“Desperate,” she said. “Don’t you understand? I just lost a baby in the surf at Leftovers while you were pulling me to shore. I’m not blaming you, though the wave seemed a mile away and maybe I started losing it as I paddled out. But you don’t remember that—you don’t remember anything. I think it was an omen like all the other omens, that nothing in our lives would go right. Nothing has gone right since the day of the accident—it’s been one bloody thing after another, nothing has been normal. You were acting strange. I tried to get away. I discovered I was pregnant—you seemed happy about it, and then, wouldn’t you know, I lost the baby in all that surf. And my nausea has gone away. I’m sleeping better. I have no cramps. I’ve recovered my health. I’m seeing things clearly. And”—here her voice broke—“I’m desperate.”

Sharkey listened to this without an expression, though it seemed to her that he had a fixed look of mild impatience, as though listening to her speaking was just a question of waiting for her to finish—not objecting to anything she said, because in a short while she would be exhausted and done, delivered of her complaint. Then they could go on, eat something, smoke a joint, go to bed early—and with this in mind he yawned.

Olive was breathing hard; her rant had made her head ring.

Sharkey squinted at her and said, “The accident—what about it?”

“You remember it?”

He stuck his lower lip out, equivocating. She knew that face of his, she knew all his facial expressions, they were often a boy’s obstinacy, the reactions of someone who hated to explain. This one meant I don’t understand what you’re driving at, but even if I did understand I wouldn’t care. And it maddened her to see this response form on his face.

“That drunk homeless guy.”

“It was a man,” she said, her voice rising. “You killed him.”

An accident, he thought; an obstacle, like many he’d surfed in his life.

Like dropping into a mushy wave at a break he’d never surfed before and finding as he cut left that it was not mushy at all but instead the curved face of a slowly forming barrel, overtopping him until, in seconds, he was in the tube, shacked as though in a cave of blue ice, and seeing only a narrowing lozenge of light at the far end, which was his only salvation as long as he steadied himself in a crouch and maintained his speed, but he did not know for sure whether he would make it out of the barrel upright until he succeeded and burst into the blaze of sun, the barrel breaking, squeezing and closing behind him like snatching hands in a smash of heavy water.