His lazy boast, always, was that he never fussed, and he was contemptuous of anyone who claimed to care, as though they were revealing a weakness.

“The best doctor at Queen’s read your MRI.”

“What doctor? What MRI?”

“‘He’s good to go,’ he said. You’re fine.”

Sharkey smiled as though at a child too small to understand and needing to be humored. He said, “Of course I’m fine. Listen, there was no hospital, okay? I’ve been surfing awesome waves.”

Was it the conspicuous humiliation of the hospital gown, having to submit to the tunnel of the machine, or the long, almost all-day delay in Emergency? But he remembered nothing of it.

She said, “Except for the hospital and the tests, you haven’t left the house.”

He began to laugh, but softly, and then he stopped and nodded, as though he’d become aware that he was mocking her for inventing the trip to the hospital and the scan.

He glanced at Olive in pity for not understanding him, as though she were someone adrift in a sea of uncertainty and seeming to believe she was safe, just bobbing in circles and liking the rise and fall of the swell and never realizing she was lost. All this time, his soft, accommodating smile.

The sun was setting again into the seam of the horizon, the last of the light flashing on his face. He was remembering the barrel of a wave. Olive was watching him. When he turned to her, she was horrified by the sight of him: his wide-open eyes were unlit, dull, and disappointed, his face waxen, no light behind it. She remembered the man on the road, his martyr’s death mask of surrender. Then Sharkey resumed talking in the darkness, another story she’d heard before.

10

Hapai

While Olive worked every day at the hospital, Sharkey sat as though immobilized, yet smiling his sleepy smile—repeating his stories and imagining that his days were full of sunlight and big waves. She could not convince him that his life was emptying, narrowing, closing in on him—closing in on her too. He was unworried, yet she felt the onset of uncertainty that extended to her body as a physical imbalance, at times producing dizziness, a feeling at moments of vertigo. Was it loneliness that provoked the sensation that she was toppling forward?

Often in this mood she was weakened by a wave of nausea passing through her. She wanted to tell him, “I am not feeling well. Therefore I’m alive.” In the house with him she became mournful—lonely, a feeling she seldom had when she was alone—and at times she went outside or back to the hospital to cure herself of loneliness among her friends.

“You stay okay?” Luana, the shift nurse, asked.

“A little pukey.”

Luana hugged her, big warm damp arms and hair thick with coconut oil. “You take something, sister. It’s a shame.”