From the bus window on the way back to Waikiki, she saw a bumper sticker on a beatup car: NO BAD DAYS. She kept the memory from Rupert. The flight to Heathrow via Los Angeles took eighteen hours. They arrived before dawn, the taxi rattling through greasy streets, heavily dressed people jostling at bus stops to keep warm, frowning like bewildered refugees, resigned to rain, the black solidities of London house fronts, the mute unwelcoming English look. Rupert groaned, saying he had a meeting at the bank later that morning. “And the hospital awaits you, petal.”

On their arriving home after a holiday, Rupert always told the same joke: “Wipe that smile off your face, Ollie. We’re back in England.” He said it that morning and looked at her. “Bloody hell, you’re still smiling.”

Later, she told Sharkey she had been thinking, I want to live on the island of no bad days.

She did not tell Rupert she’d come to a decision. She knew he’d oppose her. Within a month she’d resigned from St. Thomas’ Hospital and was back in Hawaii, applying for a job at Kahuku Medical Center and living near Rocky Point, alone.

Sharkey finished his cup of green tea, and the recollection of the talk with Olive made him smile, because it suggested that he’d had fame, and that his fame would grow, and that something would come of it. But he knew that was not so. All this time he dabbed at his foot, where the goose had clawed him. He glanced at his hand, and seeing that he had blood on his fingers, he licked it off. The wound wasn’t serious—just a claw mark.

Olive had left a note for him on the counter, one word in her neat nurse’s hand, all caps—WANKER.

It was a love note, her perverse way of complimenting him, an English thing, teasing the one you love most.

He was content. He was now convinced that the beauty of his life was a certainty that nothing more, nothing greater, would happen to him; that, at peace, he asked for nothing; that he was only on another wave, sliding, climbing, paddling up its back, hovering at its lip, tipping and then racing through the tube—a man surfing, moving in an easy crouch through turbulence, all the time reading its features and its froth, anticipating its alteration, keeping a fraction ahead of his roll, just a man on a board, flying across the swelling slope of heavy water.

2

Epic Surf

His dreams prepared him for the day, nothing in his mind was accidental; the wave that rose in his sleep broke on his waking and swept him into the morning.