The question was vague and ungraspable. It was like being asked, “Who are you?” He had not thought of What next? And in his confusion he became aware of a commotion inside the house, a swelling of shouts and bumping floorboards, as of sudden knocking feet. With that too, being crowded by hearty boys and laughing girls, the golden youths, jostling to get near Garrett as Garrett laughed, fending them off, calling out, “He did it too! The Shark was at Nazaré!”

But no one heard, or if they did, no one recognized his name, and Sharkey stepped aside as the surfers pushed past him.

But beyond this were the other cries—yelps, urgent shouts from inside the house, as Franco appeared at a side door and called out, “Olive—we need you here!”

Sharkey watched like a sleepy child as Franco called the woman’s name again to the next house, another bungalow behind the hedge of torch ginger and heliconia stalks and crooked plumeria branches.

A small but certain voice in the twilight responded, “I’m here.”

“Bring your kit. I think we have a situation.”

A woman in a pink patterned pareu parted the flowering hedge, a black valise under her arm. She brushed past Sharkey and he got a whiff of her, not perfume but a soapy aroma of damp hair and glowing skin and a tangle of sweetness, maybe from the crushed petals on the hedge.

“In here,” Franco said.

“Call 911,” the woman said, entering the house.

Sharkey in his semidaze drifted to the window and looked inside, relieved that it was open, no glass now to reflect his face. A boy lay doubled up on the floor and the woman knelt beside him and began talking to him, urging him to wake, taking his pulse, putting her ear to his chest and mouth. The boy was eerily bluish, his shirt unbuttoned, his toes feebly twitching.

“I just found him here like this,” a girl crouching nearby said.

“Did you see him take anything?”

“He does a bunch of stuff. China Girl. Tango. Batu. I don’t know. Is he going to be okay? Hey, what’s that?”

“Narcan,” the woman said, adjusting her pareu as she waved away the fretting girl. “Move, please.”

“They’re coming,” Franco said.

And Sharkey watched, breathing slowly, as the woman in the pareu bent over the boy, her face against the boy’s, her mouth locked on his in what seemed sudden passion, heaving her breath into him, pressing on his bare chest. The kiss of life. Then she sat up and frowned, her hands snatching at her bag, unwrapping a syringe, biting the tip off, holding it to the light, the window where Sharkey stared, drunk with fascination, a humming in his head, half smiling.