Wish

by Joseph Monninger

  I looked at Tommy. He seemed exhausted, worn out from the flight, but he leaned forward expectantly, as if he wanted to see every last thing around him. Mr. Cotter explained that we had a room on Fisherman’s Wharf, and then asked if Tommy knew anything about Joe DiMaggio. Joe D, as Mr. Cotter called him, had been a native San Franciscan and had played for the Seals, a minor-league team, before moving on to the Yankees. Mr. Cotter might have been talking about Santa Claus for all the reality it had for Tommy, but Tommy nodded and said it was interesting.

  Then we had that quiet that sometimes comes over a carload of people. I’ve experienced it before. Everyone is tired, and no one has anything new to say, and so for a few minutes you simply ride along, your head leaning against the window. I had no idea where we were, or where we were going, but Mr. Cotter drove calmly and I felt peaceful and empty and good. I reached over and held Tommy’s hand.

  When we got to the hotel—the Hyatt on Fisherman’s Wharf—my mother casually asked where Oakland was in relation to the hotel. My body was half in the car and half out, and it took me about a second to know the score. Obviously, Businessman Bob had been from Oakland. She tried to phrase it casually, as if she happened to be a geography bug and simply wanted to get her bearings, and Mr. Cotter fell for it. Old men love to talk about directions, and I almost laughed because he gave her more than she bargained for. Meanwhile, I grabbed our bags and stacked them by the door, where a bellhop began putting them on a luggage trolley. I didn’t know if we were supposed to have that kind of service, if the Blue Moon agreement covered tips and things, but I didn’t stop the guy. By the time Mr. Cotter finished explaining the directions to Oakland, the bellhop had us ready to go into the hotel.

  “Mom,” I said, to peel her away, “I think Tommy’s tired.”

  She nodded. She was tired, too. We all were.

  Mr. Cotter took the cue. He told us he would pick us up at five the next morning. He handed Mom an envelope to “cover incidentals.” Then he patted Tommy on the shoulder and went back around the front of the Cadillac. He waved one last time and climbed inside, and a second later his Cadillac floated away from the curb.

  I helped Tommy write his Blue Moon Foundation application.

  Mrs. Burns, his English teacher at Pemigewasset Junior High, helped him with the final draft. The grammar and form are better than Tommy could do by himself, but it sounds like Tommy anyway.

  I have CF—cystic fibrosis.

  Twice a day (at least) I wear a vest that massages and shakes my chest, and usually I feel better afterward, but not always.

  I have some digestive problems, too, a deficiency with my pancreas. My body does not absorb the fat from foods the way other people’s bodies do, so I take an enzyme-replacement capsule with each meal. I take vitamins A and D, because I’m always low on those, but I still never put on weight. I’m skinny, and bony, and my head looks too big on my shoulders. I’m not saying that for sympathy. I’ve looked at myself enough in the mirror and I know it’s true. I look a little like an alien, especially because I have big eyes, and kids called me Froggy when I was younger, but the teachers made them stop that. Some kids called me E.T.

  The long and short of it is, I am undersized, and I have to be careful with certain foods, like dairy, that increase the production of phlegm. The big deal is that my life expectancy is shorter than the average person’s by almost half. I should live to about my mid-thirties or early forties, and I am eleven now, so I am nearly a third finished with my life. Also, it’s uncertain if I can have children, because CF affects fertility. Even if I can have children, some experts feel carriers should not risk passing along the gene. Each cell in our bodies contains twenty-two pairs of chromosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. The faulty gene that causes CF is found on chromosome 7. About one in twenty-two people have the CF mutation on one of the pair of number 7 chromosomes, and those people are called carriers. They have no symptoms of CF. When both parents are CF carriers, a child has a one-in-four chance of being born with CF, a one-in-two chance of being a carrier, and a one-in-four chance of being healthy.

  The Blue Moon Foundation is one of the best things going in the lives of kids like me. It gives us hope. I would like to go and dive with great white sharks because they are the apex predator fish and they fascinate me. Although I love Jaws and Shark Week and all the sensational elements associated with sharks, I also love the biology of sharks. They are one of the oldest organisms on earth and I am one of the youngest, so I have a great deal to learn from them. When a shark swims the seas, he is also swimming in time. I suppose we all are, but sharks have done it longer.

  I live with my mother, Grace, and my sister, Beatrice, in Warren, New Hampshire. My mother is a single mom. My sister takes care of me a lot and she is an honor student and class president at Woodsville High School. I attend Pemigewasset Junior High and I average in the B range because I miss plenty of school when things with my CF kick in. I’m not making excuses, it’s just a fact of life. In my free time, I surf the Web, mostly in shark chat communities.

  If I were to be in the ocean with a shark—a great white off the coast of California—it would be my ultimate dream. I hope you will consider my application. I’m sure there are many kids worse off than I am, so I will understand if you cannot fund my wish.

  Some observations about Fisherman’s Wharf.

  1. It’s a tourist trap.

  2. If you’re in San Francisco, you kind of have to go. Everything in San Francisco points back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Probably because it isn’t hilly like the rest of the city and you can smell the ocean. Portland, Maine, has a wharf sort of like it, but it’s much smaller and not nearly such a big deal.

  3. It’s a wharf, which means boats dock there, and fishermen push carts around and people throw fish and shout. They do it for the tourists, but they also do it for real, sort of. It’s kind of half and half.

  4. You could spend a billion dollars on clothes in the shops. Anything you’ve seen in fashion magazines is here—way more than in all of New Hampshire. It’s all supertrendy and people walk around with smoothies and crazy coffees and shop. That’s all anyone seems to do on Fisherman’s Wharf. Plus eat.

  5. I bet some nights it’s easy to get jammed into a crowd, with people pushing and trying to get by one another. But October seems calmer. You can’t really see the stars except way out at the horizon where the city lights don’t penetrate.

  6. About a million kids roam around, most of them skate-boarders. It’s like seeing the edge of an entire street culture rubbing up against the tourists.

  7. The brochures say you can eat excellent Chinese food, but we didn’t find any.

  8. It’s three thousand miles away from New Hampshire.

  9. It’s made of wood and people get splinters, but a lot of kids go barefoot anyway. Stupid.

  10. It reminds me of fairs we have in New Hampshire in the fall. It smells like french fries and fried dough, only they have different things here like deep-fried cheese curds.

  11. The sun sets in the ocean here and in the mountains in New Hampshire. We once went to Cadillac Mountain, Maine, which is supposed to be the first place the sun strikes land in the lower forty-eight states. It’s weird to think of the sun traveling all the way across the states and landing in the ocean right here. I know the sun doesn’t really travel—I mean, we spin, and the sun moves, and all that—but the East Coast is the golf tee and this is the hole.

  Mom bought us dinner at a crab stand. The brochure from the hotel claimed that Fisherman’s Wharf crab stands constituted the raison d’être—or “reason for being”—for the area. Originally people came for the crabs and the local flavor of the fishing fleet. Eventually the spot became a tourist destination. Now you can take boat rides and sail under the Golden Gate Bridge, or take a trip to Alcatraz, the famous prison. If you hold a dollar in the air, ten people will help you spend it.

  We ate at the crab booth, sitting on stools. It was nice being outside on a fall
night. Mom was in a good mood. We had money for once—she showed me the envelope Mr. Cotter had given her, which contained a thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills—and we actually behaved like a family, sort of. Tommy looked happy. He didn’t say anything about the other kids scheduled to be on the boat with him, or what it might mean for his chances to dive with a great white. He concentrated on the crabs and french fries and his orange soda, and I could almost see his lungs relaxing a little in the salt air.

  I felt good, too. School seemed a million miles away. New Hampshire in October is beautiful, all the leaves turning and woodstoves beginning to push smoke up the chimneys, but on Fisherman’s Wharf you could see every kind of person, and people looked happy to be on vacation, or killing time, and living felt easier somehow. I thought of my friends, Jill and Marcie and Maggie, but I’d left my cell phone at home on purpose so that I wouldn’t be tempted to text them. This trip was for Tommy and I had pledged not to divide my attention. I didn’t want to start obsessing about schoolwork, or the lame social scene at Woodsville High, or about any of the half dozen idiotic boys who hung around us. It didn’t matter right then. I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders and breathed, really breathed, for what felt like the first time in months. I knew I carried tension in my shoulders, so I straightened them and worked on my posture. I drank my soda down to the ice and made a cross-eyed face that often got Tommy laughing. It was supposed to mean that we had sucked in so far that our eyes bent inward. Or it could mean that we had sucked down something cold and we had an ice headache, something we called a caveman, because all you could do when you had one was make stupid grunting sounds, like uhhh uhhh uhhh. I looked over at Tommy and expected him to laugh, but instead he put his hand up for quiet and turned his head.

  In that instant, Tommy heard them.

  “Seals,” Tommy said.

  He stood and started walking.

  I had never seen him move more quickly, or with such determination. Mom had the same reaction as I did, because she called out to him, trying to get him to wait, but he didn’t pay any attention. Luckily Mom had already settled the bill, so I hustled after him with Mom trailing me. Tommy didn’t acknowledge our existence. I listened to the noise that had attracted him, an arrrrr arrrr arrrrrr that could only have been made by seals, but I’m not sure I would have noticed it without him. Tommy lifted his head and I realized that he usually walked hunched over, his lungs a stubborn weight in his chest, his legs under-developed, but suddenly he shucked out of that. He was on point, as my uncle Louis said about bird dogs when they struck a trail.

  Tommy didn’t say There or Look or turn to see if we had followed when he arrived at the overlook of Pier 39. He simply stopped at the metal railing and let his eyes run all over the sight before him.

  As soon as I saw the sea lions stretched out on the docks, their bodies like so many shrugs of meat, I remembered seeing the same scene on TV programs, and on postcards, but I hadn’t really considered that it existed in a place and time and that I could visit it. Sea lions lounged everywhere, their bodies scattered and limp, their fur glossy and brilliant. Two sea lions, maybe males, had squared off and now barked furiously at each other, while a few seals answered tentatively from another dock. Cameras flashed all around the seals and people raised their hands and pointed at this one or that one. Tommy simply watched.

  “Oh, the seals!” Mom said when we had collected at the railing overlooking the pier. “Tommy, don’t run off like that again.”

  He nodded.

  Mom dug in her purse for the digital camera she had borrowed from Aunt Carol. It took her a second to get the camera out, figure how to work it, and point it. When she felt comfortable with it, she told us to turn so that she could take our photograph. She wanted to have the seals in the background, and she thought if she got up on her toes she might be able to catch the right angle.

  I turned.

  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, becaus
e 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.