Saying he was too grief-stricken to view her body, he received her ashes by mail and scattered them off Shark’s Cove on a day of big surf that would disperse them, perhaps dissolve them. As the dust of her remains left his fingers he was given life, a fortune, a long career as a surfer that was easily summed up.

He was interviewed often, and always he was described as a natural waterman, with effortless grace and bravery, able to ride the biggest waves, imitated by many, admired by nearly everyone, envied, and praised, but not loved—surfers were too selfish and single-minded to be loved. He had achieved his goal of riding a one-hundred-foot wave, which was not a wave but a life on the water.

This was what most people knew of Sharkey, the account of his life that he offered to interviewers, such as the young woman from the surfing magazine who said, “This is the hardest assignment I’ve ever had. You have everything, especially that thing that makes you impossible to write about—you’re happy.”

But, like most of what people tell you about themselves, little of this was accurate. Because the messy essentials, the painful, shaming episodes, were left out; this version of Sharkey was misleading, and incomplete, and much of it false.

6

Portents

The unexpected happens—a comic or odd blindside,” Sharkey was saying to Olive, “and at the time you smile. Then afterward you understand that events give off power. The vibes affect you. And when you see that they were warnings and omens you get the shudders, like coming off a big wave you’d ridden mindlessly and you think, ‘Man, I could have died.’”

Staring at him as if he were someone approaching her on a sidewalk, as though trying to decide if he was a man she knew, Olive said simply, in a small, certain voice, “But it was the bloke on the push-bike that died.”

“It’s all pau,” Sharkey said.

She still stared at him, wondering at the word, meaning “done,” and waiting for more.

“I should have seen it coming,” he said. He smiled to think that he hadn’t paid attention to the portents. He’d been tapped on the shoulder but he hadn’t turned around. “I ignored the warnings. It cost me.”

“Cost that poor bloke his life, you mean.” Her disbelief was concentrated in her squinting tone.

“Totally freaked me out,” Sharkey said, looking away.

“What are you talking about?” Yes, she thought, he seemed like a stranger, one speaking in a different language, a foreigner, oblivious, half deaf. So, trying to make him understand, she spoke as though to a child.