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.
The 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.
“Bee wants to go to Dartmouth,” Tommy said at one point. “She goes over to the campus and walks around and pretends she’s a student there.”
I bumped Tommy’s shoulder and turned red.
“Is that so, Bee?” Mr. Cotter asked. “It’s a great school.”
“It’s my top choice,” I said.
“She wants to go to the Ivy League,” Tommy said, crumbs from his blueberry muffin flecking his chest. “And she will. Whatever Bee sets her mind to, she does.”
“That’s an admirable trait,” Mr. Cotter said, looking at me as if for the first time. “Be sure you get in touch
with me when you get ready to apply. I pull a little bit of weight out there.”
“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”
Mr. Cotter and I exchanged a look, then we went back to eating bagels. I sipped coffee. It tasted smooth and rich.
Afterward, Mr. Cotter talked about volunteering for the Blue Moon Foundation, which he had been doing for three or four years, he couldn’t remember exactly. Tommy said, “Thank you, Mr. Cotter,” and Mr. Cotter reached out a hand and put it on Tommy’s shoulder and I knew Mr. Cotter understood that Tommy had a difficult ride with CF, and that the purpose of the trip couldn’t be separated from the reality of Tommy’s shortened life. Mr. Cotter didn’t have to say much, and neither did Tommy. Mr. Cotter patted Tommy’s shoulder twice, then went back to his coffee.
Finally Mom showed up, a big tote bag at her side, her hair pulled back in a nutty-looking ponytail, her body trailing too much perfume. She grabbed a muffin, apologized for making us wait, and laughed when Mr. Cotter said the tides wait for no man but they will for a woman. Then we climbed into the Cadillac and drove toward the pier.
That’s how the ocean found us.
TOMMY SHARK FACT #3: When most people think of a great white, they usually think in terms of length. That’s a mistake, according to Tommy. A great white’s girth is its most extraordinary feature. A nineteen-foot great white could take a six-foot-tall human and swallow him like a sideways Ritz cracker. Great whites are wide, and round, and come through the water like a moving tunnel. Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, wrote: “Sharks have no interest in hurting you; they just want to eat you.”
Captain O’Shay told us to come aboard the Gray Jay.
He was a big man with a big boat. He wore a Giants hat and a Giants hoodie and his boat had a Giants insignia painted on the hull. Something had happened to his face a long time ago, because his left profile appeared dented, as if someone had started to remold his features and then lost interest. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his cheek whiskers appeared white when you looked at him in a certain light. His voice carried to an unusual degree, as if he had spent his life shouting over the wind and could no longer remember what it was to speak quietly.
“It’s a little snotty out on the water,” he said by way of welcome, “but we should be okay. Three attacks on elephant seals yesterday. Welcome aboard. Welcome. Mind your step.”
“Hello, Dave,” Mr. Cotter said, handing the captain the cooler. “You’re looking well.”
“Henry, you old salt,” Captain O’Shay called back.
Obviously, they knew each other.
Before we had climbed completely aboard, a short yellow school bus pulled in at the top of the pier. I felt my stomach sink. The bus made a beeping sound as it backed into a parking slot. I didn’t turn to look at Tommy, but I knew he had spotted it. I stepped on board behind my mom. She held her hand out to Captain O’Shay. He smiled and shook it. A pair of gulls laughed right then. The birds lifted into the air and slid sideways on the wind.
“So, you must be Tommy,” Captain O’Shay said to my brother in his loud, kettle voice. “Well, we should have a good day. As I said, three attacks yesterday. This time of year, you can usually depend on at least one a day, but you never know. Sometimes you get five. That’s the record, anyway.”
“Off Indian Head?” Tommy asked.
The captain looked carefully at him. I had seen it happen before. People dismissed Tommy as a cute little CF kid, but then Tommy said something that changed their perception. I saw Captain O’Shay reappraise him.
“You know the islands?” he asked Tommy.
“Just from studying them. Shark Alley, Mirounga Bay, North Landing. Just some of the places.”
Captain O’Shay looked at Mr. Cotter, then back to Tommy.
Before the captain could say anything else, the bus began to unload.
Challenged kids.
You could tell right away. A large lady holding a clipboard climbed down first, then leaned inside and said something to the group. It took her a long time to say what she needed to say. When she pulled back out, it was almost as if the suction of her body leaving the door yanked the kids free from the bus. They stepped down haltingly, forming in loose pairs, and then started pointing at the boat. Their voices came pretty hard over the salt air, and the modulations were all wrong, too high, too wild. A couple of the kids started charging down the gangway to the boat and the large lady swooped after them.
I couldn’t breathe, watching them.
And I didn’t dare look at Tommy.
Because Tommy was not a kid who was challenged in that particular way. And I would never, ever say anything against those kids, but it wasn’t fair for Tommy to be lumped in with them. I imagined right away how it all went: how Mr. Cotter, or maybe another well-meaning grown-up at the foundation, had contacted Captain O’Shay and booked the boat for a group rate. Maybe they had dickered over the price, appealing to O’Shay’s sense of philanthropy, and I could guess the reasoning. They were all kids and they all had impairments. Tommy was simply one more kid, and the grown-ups didn’t mean anything bad by it, but that’s what it was. I glanced at Mr. Cotter and saw his face clouding over, because now, I knew, he understood Tommy better. Tommy probably knew more about sharks than anyone on the boat, but he was relegated to being a plain tourist, a kid, and he didn’t deserve that.
It also pained me to see that Tommy understood one more thing. Once and for all he realized that people regarded him as they regarded the kids getting off the bus. Different. Less, somehow. Needful.
The large lady’s name was Mrs. Halpern.
She had a smaller, younger woman with her, Ms. Sprague, as a second-in-command. Mrs. Halpern was in charge, but Ms. Sprague did the legwork. They reminded me of two dogs herding the kids down the gangway. Mrs. Halpern was a big, slow-moving guard dog; Ms. Sprague was a border collie, quick to move, quick to react.
Mrs. Halpern introduced the kids, but I didn’t really listen. Maybe that sounds unfair, or mean-spirited, but I didn’t care. They took a while to navigate the gangplank, to slip into life jackets, to adjust themselves to the boat’s rocking. I had nothing against them. One, a girl, turned to me and said something about sharks, and about the ocean, and I nodded. Another pointed at some gulls.
And when a boy of about ten got his arm tangled in the life vest, Tommy stepped nearer and helped him.
I felt all my anger drain away. I watched Tommy move forward, his step as weak as some of the challenged kids, and I saw him meet the boy’s eyes. The boy clearly had motor-skill difficulties, but he smiled as Tommy helped him straighten the jacket and pull it tight. And Tommy, his small, unhealthy body unsteady on the rolling boat, did not exhibit a moment’s hesitation at touching a stranger. He moved with gentle deliberateness, his attention transferred to his fingers as he straightened the jacket. He patted the boy’s shoulder.
“I’m Tommy,” Tommy introduced himself. “You’re Mark?”
“Mark,” the boy said, though his voice garbled the name a little.
“Okay,” Tommy said. “Let’s have a good day.”
That simple.
TOMMY SHARK FACT #4: Pliny the Elder, in AD 78, wrote that fossilized sharks’ teeth rained from the sky during lunar eclipses. Other writers of the time speculated that the teeth were actually serpent tongues turned to stone by St. Peter. The teeth became known as glossopetrae—“tongue stones”—which possessed magical powers. People wore them as amulets and tailors sewed special pockets in garments so that the glossopetrae could be kept close to the body. Not until the mid-seventeenth century did a Danish scientist named Steno dissect a great white’s head from an animal captured off the coast of Italy. Eventually the shark’s teeth figured into its Latin name, Carcharodon carcharias, or “ragged tooth.”
We passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, which was beautiful, but dangerous, according to Mr. Cotter. He said people looked out from San Francisco and saw a clear day and made the mistake of assuming the whole ocea
n was a pond. Once they hit the Golden Gate Bridge, things changed rapidly, and suddenly the ocean became an ocean. Add fog and a ton of tricky currents, and the waters had a history of treachery.
“The Coast Guard stays busy around here,” he said. “An old colleague of mine tells a story about a catamaran that called mayday from the Farallones. The radio transmission said a wave had just come through the cabin, and that was the last anyone ever heard from them. Six people on board.”
Mr. Cotter must have seen me turn white. We stood at the starboard railing, watching the bridge pass overhead. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry. I meant it as an interesting story, that’s all. No need to worry. Captain O’Shay has made this trip a thousand times. But I’m afraid we’re in for a little rough weather. The Farallones are notorious for choppy seas.”
“How long will it take us?”
“Oh, four hours or so. Depends on the conditions. You can’t really predict from here what it’s going to be like out there. You know, it used to be an egging station. Gulls’ eggs. A fellow named Robinson came out here in 1849 in search of eggs. Seems California didn’t have many chickens, though I never heard why that was. Anyway, he and his brother brought back a boatload of murre eggs and sold them for a buck a dozen. I guess the eggs worked for baking, but they had red yolks, so people didn’t much care for that. The brothers made three thousand dollars, which was an awful lot of money at that time. A couple of rival companies set up shop here when they heard about the Robinsons’ success, and some enterprising gent designed egg shirts that the pickers could wear. The shirts held up to eighteen dozen eggs. A funny business. I think it ended in a shoot-out between the companies.”
“Are there a lot of birds on the Farallones?”
“Oh, my,” Mr. Cotter said. “More than you can dream. On the mainland, the eggers used to be known by the scars on their scalps from dive-bombing gulls. The birds are everywhere. You know, the Farallones were once known as the Devil’s Teeth? Sailors named the islands that because they have a frightening outline against the sea. It’s a foreboding place.”
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