Wish

by Joseph Monninger

  “Leave it to Tommy to pick a place like that for his wish.”

  “How’s he doing, anyway?” Mr. Cotter asked, his eyes on the water.

  “On the trip?”

  “No, in general. With his health.”

  “It’s not good,” I said, watching a gull hover above our wake. “He can’t put on any weight and he’s prone to too many illnesses. He never complains, but you can see he has good days and bad days. He’s spent years in the different doctors’ offices. Sometimes he just seems tired of it all.”

  “Your mom gets some help with the medical costs?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s only a hostess at a restaurant, so we get some help.”

  He nodded.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m prying,” he said. “I just wanted to know the score a little bit so that I don’t put my foot in my mouth. They can’t release much information to volunteers like me at the foundation. Confidentiality of medical records and so on. Tommy’s an awfully charming young man. I can’t remember meeting anyone as forthright and all-around honest as he is.”

  “Everyone loves Tommy. He has no defenses. Everything has been stripped away and what’s left is genuine.”

  “You’re mature to see that,” Mr. Cotter said. “A lot of teenagers wouldn’t.”

  “You can’t miss it with Tommy.”

  “Just the same, it’s good to see a brother and sister who care for each other. He clearly thinks the moon sets on you.”

  “We’re pretty close,” I said.

  I liked talking to Mr. Cotter. He asked me about school, but he wasn’t like some adults who ask and then don’t listen. He was old enough not to be rushed, or to think he had to be somewhere else. He offered his full attention. We talked a little more about New Hampshire, which seemed like a magical place in his memory.

  While we talked, the seas grew rougher. Neither one of us said anything about it, but we both noted it and our conversation became laced with moments of silence when we listened to the waves. The Gray Jay began to labor more determinedly in the wallows, and the cresting waves grew to five or six feet. It didn’t seem dangerous, but it didn’t seem easy, either.

  “I’m going to look for Tommy,” I said after a while. “See how he’s doing.”

  “He’s up with the captain. I’ll duck in and see how our group is faring. We have a thermos of hot chocolate if you’re interested.”

  I climbed the short ladder to the captain’s wheelhouse and pushed through the door. I knew at first glance that Tommy had a growing case of seasickness. His face looked white; when he smiled, it seemed to drain off his face, as if the muscles of his chin and cheeks couldn’t sustain any coordinated movement. Captain O’Shay, on the other hand, looked entirely at home. He had a large elephant-ear cinnamon bun on the console in front of him, and he broke off pieces as he watched the horizon. He reminded me of the gulls that occasionally passed overhead. He was all belly and appetite.

  “So this is the sister, is it?” he said when I stepped inside. “Well, your brother here knows more about sharks than just about anybody who has taken this trip. Marine biologists included! We were just talking about elephant seals. That’s the real stuff. When a white shark takes an elephant seal, you’ve never seen such blood.”

  “The blood is superoxygenated,” Tommy explained. “Because elephant seals dive way, way down. They have to have more oxygen in their blood. More than other seals.”

  “And they’re huge,” Captain O’Shay said, eating more cinnamon bun. “Just enormous.”

  Then Captain O’Shay pointed with his right hand, the hand holding another wedge of cinnamon bun. I followed the line of his arm. A couple hundred yards away, a whale blew spray into the air. It looked like a teakettle coming to boil.

  “We’ve got company!” Captain O’Shay said, then grabbed the microphone. He spoke into it, letting the group downstairs know he had spotted a whale. A gray whale, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure from this distance. After he hung up the microphone, he explained that Mrs. Halpern’s school had authorized a whale-watching trip. The sharks, he said, were just a sideline. Some people didn’t think kids should be going out to watch a bloody shark attack, but personally he didn’t agree. Nature was nature, and the sooner kids got used to it, the sooner their real education started.

  That was when Tommy threw up.

  He threw up without making it outside, or to a waste-basket, or to anything else that might have contained the mess. He threw up reflexively, and violently, and Captain O’Shay muttered, “Oh, crud,” and I took off to grab towels. I hustled down the stairs, then ran into the cabin where the challenged kids sat sipping hot chocolate. I spotted Mom talking to Mrs. Halpern. I yanked a few hand towels off the table near the hot chocolate, then shot back up to the cabin. No one had moved. Tommy stood with his arms out at his sides, as if he couldn’t believe what he had done, and Captain O’Shay stood on one leg to keep his feet free of vomit.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Tommy.

  He started to cry.

  “It’s okay,” I said again, although I nearly gagged as I cleaned Tommy’s chest and arms. I told him to step outside and if he needed to throw up, to do it over the rail.

  “Port side,” Captain O’Shay called after him as Tommy went out. “Not into the wind.”

  I bent and cleaned up the mess. I had to fight my gag response the entire time. Captain O’Shay moved his feet around to give me room to mop. It was disgusting. I bundled the towels together and stood when I finished.

  “He’s a good boy,” Captain O’Shay said, looking straight ahead. “He may not feel up to it in any case, but I doubt we’ll be putting anybody over the side today. Too choppy. I think we’ll just be sightseers.”

  “He wants to dive,” I said. “It means everything to him.”

  Captain O’Shay nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “the sea has the final word. We’ll check the conditions when we get there. Meanwhile, keep him in the fresh air and see how his belly reacts. If he can eat a little something, it might help him. Seasickness is a miserable state of affairs.”

  I carried the towels outside and found Tommy leaning on the railing. He had thrown up again, he said. He appeared white and shaky. I told him to take deep breaths. I told him to watch the whale. I told him he would feel better soon, though both of us knew that wasn’t likely.

  At first glance, I understood why the Farallon Islands had come to be known as the Devil’s Teeth. They rose out of the ocean nearly vertically, their shores all rock, their outline black against the gray sea. The day had not grown any brighter, and the islands reminded me of a parody of a dark and stormy night: all mood and blackness and wind. Seals rested on every available rock, their bodies like gobs of mud on the islands’ skin. Above it all the gulls and murres and terns floated like flies above a garbage can. The Gray Jay moved within two hundred yards of the islands, but Captain O’Shay announced over the loudspeaker that the weather was rising. That meant, I supposed, that we wouldn’t stay long, and that the ride home would be a humdinger. I didn’t have to ask about putting a diving cage over the side.

  I’ll give Mom this: she stood beside Tommy and shut up. I know that sounds cruel, but it was the best thing to do. She had fed him a little bagel and some peanut butter and he appeared a bit steadier. The other kids had come on deck, too, and Ms. Sprague hovered around them, pressing them together like dough. I imagined what she thought: if a kid fell overboard and by some miracle didn’t drown, then you had to picture a shark swirling underneath the kid, and that was too painful to think about. Now that her group had seen a whale—the real purpose of their trip—I knew she would be just as happy turning back. Mrs. Halpern, meanwhile, stood impassively by, watching the islands and nibbling a bagel chip.

  Over the loudspeaker, Captain O’Shay said he had contacted the research team that lived on one of the islands and they had not experienced any attacks so far this morning. None of that quite made sense to me, and
it was only after Tommy explained that the Farallones had been designated a national reserve, and that a team of marine biologists lived there, studying the sharks and tagging them when possible, that I began to get a better idea of what Captain O’Shay meant.

  I went to the other side of the boat and found Mr. Cotter standing at the railing, his eyes out to sea.

  “How are you feeling, Bee?” he asked.

  “Surprisingly, no problem.”

  “Some of the kids are getting sick,” he said, lifting his chin to indicate the challenged kids behind him. “It’s a long way to come to see a rocky set of islands.”

  “But the sharks are here,” I said.

  “That they are. I saw one feeding on an elephant seal out this way many years ago. It was before anyone gave this place much thought. Now, of course, the BBC did a documentary on it, and the government has put a research team out here. It’s changed for the better. Anyway, one day I came here on a sailing trip with my son, and we had gone a little beyond this spot where we are now when we both saw a big commotion in the water. Neither one of us witnessed the attack, but we saw the shark close on the seal afterward. An elephant seal is an enormous animal, but the shark ate it in three or four bites. I remember the violence of the shaking most of all. The shark grabbed the carcass and shook it back and forth. Astonishing, really.”

  “Did it frighten you?”

  “No more than bad weather would. You wouldn’t want to come out here and do a slow breaststroke toward the island. The trick is to stay off the surface. That’s why whites sometimes mistake surfboards for seals. They see a shape and little flipper hands coming off and they surge up from the bottom. The island research team has a shed full of old surfboards that have been bitten by whites. Daunting to look at, believe me.”

  “Do you think we’ll see anything today?”

  “We might. The weather won’t bother them. The trouble is, we can’t stay very long. It will get too rough for the kids.”

  “Tommy will be crushed if we don’t see one.”

  Mr. Cotter nodded.

  “You look after him, don’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Taking care of someone can teach you a great deal,” he said. “It’s troublesome, and it’s easy to get annoyed, but your heart, well, it gets stronger. You do it for Tommy, of course, but you do it for yourself, too. I took care of my wife at the end and I wouldn’t trade that time.”

  “Was she sick for very long?”

  “For quite a while. More than two years. I learned to love her in a different way.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Right then Captain O’Shay came on the PA system and told us we had a kill.

  TOMMY SHARK FACT #5: A great white does not chew its food. It rips off chunks of blubber and gristle and swallows them whole. A white has about three thousand teeth, triangular in shape and serrated along the edges. It uses the first two rows of teeth to grab and cut; the rows behind rotate in and take the place of worn-out or damaged teeth. After consuming a seal, a white may last a month or two before it needs to feed again.

  Captain O’Shay leaned on the throttle pretty hard, and the boat lolled and banged through the waves on a wild ride. We headed away from the sun, that was all I knew, and circled around the islands. I ran upstairs to find Tommy. By the time I reached him, he had his head inside the captain’s cabin, and had obviously engaged in a conversation and received a report. He pulled his head out a second later. He looked bright-eyed and happy.

  “The Sisters,” he said. “Mirounga Bay.”

  “The Sisters?”

  Before he could explain, the boat jammed on a wave and bucked, and Tommy nearly lost his balance. I grabbed him.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “She was sick. She went below.”

  I grabbed the back of his life jacket.

  “Captain O’Shay said we want to be on the starboard side,” Tommy said. “Let’s go!”

  We scuttled around the back of the boat, then cut across to the starboard side. I kept Tommy inside me, away from the railing. When we reached the starboard side, I spotted the islands again. They looked crueler from this angle, more horrible to think about. Birds churned everywhere. A plume of gulls circled like smoke from a pile of leaves.

  “There!” Tommy pointed.

  His voice went up. He nearly came out of his skin.

  Blood. Bright red blood. Blood redder than any blood could be. Blood swirling away from a center, from a darkness in the water, from an ending you never want to think about. Blood like a flag widening on the sea as it traveled.

  “Ten o’clock,” Captain O’Shay said over the PA.

  Tommy had spotted the kill faster than the captain. The boat rocked along, still several hundred yards away from the blood. Some of the challenged kids came out with Mrs. Halpern. She pointed her finger at the blood circle. Whether the kids understood what she meant seemed impossible to say.

  “Do you see anything?” I asked Tommy.

  He shook his head.

  “Just the blood,” he said, his voice tight with anticipation.

  “What did you mean, the Sisters?”

  “The researchers call them the Sisterhood. About three or four females who hunt out here. They’re deadly.”

  “I can’t see the seal,” I said.

  “It’s gone,” Tommy said.

  A second later we saw a fin. It passed so quickly it might have been a trick of our eyes. The fin went away from us and didn’t slice the water for more than a heartbeat. Its tail flicked a little water behind it, then it disappeared.

  “That was a shark, Tommy,” I whispered. “A great white. You’ve seen a great white. You saw a kill.”

  He nodded. He reached over and took my hand. It took me a moment to realize he was having trouble breathing.

  Late afternoon. Land breeze, the boat grinding closer to shore, gulls overhead. Seals running like black stitches through the surf. Tommy asleep with his head on my mom’s lap, his feet on mine. A quiet moment. Empty Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate rolling in windshield-wiper half circles on the table. The challenged kids come in, go out, come in again. Mrs. Halpern sitting across the boat from us, a circle of knitting growing in her hands. A purse, she told my mother. A purse that would be washed ten times, shrunken, then felted and decorated. Tight, like boiled wool. Nothing, she promised, could fit through the weave. A gift for a grandchild, a girl, who lived in Palo Alto and went to Stanford and studied chemistry. Each stitch, she told my mother, is a thought.

  Mr. Cotter drove us back to our hotel. He looked sleepy and windburned, but he tried to keep his voice high and animated for Tommy. Tommy sat up front. They talked about the Farallones and about the deep drop-off the islands created. Perfect shark ambush territory, Tommy said. Two strokes and the seals hovered over thirty feet or more of water. Dark rocks below. Plenty of cover for the great whites. A collision of two lives, but also a mutual benefit if you took the long view.

  “What are your plans for tomorrow?” Mr. Cotter asked when we got closer to the hotel. He looked in the rearview mirror to meet my mother’s eyes.

  “We thought we’d have a lazy morning, then do some sightseeing,” she said, her voice quiet and calm. “We have Monday, too. We fly out Monday night.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help out,” Mr. Cotter said. “My team has a croquet match about a hundred miles south of here. I’ll be gone all day. And Monday I’m booked.”

  “You’ve been very kind already,” my mother said. “We didn’t expect you to guide us, too.”

  “Well, at least we saw a shark,” Mr. Cotter said, turning and smiling at Tommy. “Captain O’Shay said it looked like a juvenile. Maybe ten or eleven feet.”

  “You can measure from the fin to the tip of the tail,” Tommy said. “Make a guess, anyway.”

  “He might have just been cleaning up,” Mr. Cotter said. “Maybe a bigger girl took
the seal to begin with.”

  “I couldn’t believe the color of the blood,” Mom said.

  We had been over that. She said it to fill space.

  We pulled up in front of the hotel a few minutes later. Mr. Cotter climbed out and came around to say goodbye. He hugged my mother, hugged me, then gave Tommy a handshake.

  “I’m glad I met you,” Mr. Cotter said to Tommy. “I’m sorry the weather didn’t cooperate and allow us to put you in the cage.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Cotter. Thank you for taking me to see the islands.”

  “I’ve got your address,” Mr. Cotter said. “If I make it back for a Dartmouth reunion, I’ll look you up. Maybe we can take a hike.”

  Tommy nodded. Mr. Cotter suddenly had a kind, sad look in his eyes. He reached out and put his hand softly against Tommy’s cheek and ear. I realized, watching him, that he was a man with sons, a man whose heart would crack if anything happened to his boys. And here was Tommy.

  “Okay,” Mr. Cotter said, dropping his hand. “Good luck to you all.”

  No one can meet Tommy and remain unaffected. No one can help loving him. I saw it in Mr. Cotter’s eyes. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Tommy is a light, a candle, whatever you want to call him. Sometimes he sheds light; sometimes he reflects it back at whoever looks at him. I don’t even question it any longer. It just is. When I’ve read about saints in catechism classes, I’ve always thought they were probably people like Tommy. Not supernatural, not more godly than anyone else, but simple, quiet people whose humility was the most exceptional thing about them. Tommy never holds himself above others and never looks down on anyone. He meets people square. He believes in them, because he knows even in the dullest of us, or the most lame, a person resides there.

  Mom’s cell phone rang as I slid the key card into the hotel room door.