She keeps her gaze down, but even so she can see or feel that overhead the sky is blue, mixed with a lot of white around the horizon. It’s really loud down here, all water sounds, mainly the crashing of waves; sometimes it’s a clean crack when a blue wave folds over and falls, then explodes into white spray and bounces in toward her. Mostly the sound is an ever-shifting, grumbling wet roar, water falling and breaking on itself, a zillion bubbles bursting. The whole ocean’s edge is a kind of low waterfall, falling on itself over and over. Glare of sunlight breaking in a million places on the water, bouncing in her eyes. With her sunglasses off it’s too bright to do anything but squint till her eyes are almost closed. It’s so bright that things are somehow dark.
Kaya is coming in on a wave at her, only his head sticking out of the white water. He stands up near her and points out at his friends. “That’s Pam there, nice left, see that?”
Freya shivers.
“Can we really be out here?” she asks him helplessly. “We won’t get cooked by radiation?”
She’s breathing deeply, she can’t look anywhere near the sun, it’s far too bright for that, she’s squinting, crying a little at the explosion of light coming off the breaking waves.
“Well, that’s a good thought; look at you. Did you put on sunscreen?”
“I did.”
“Your skin is really white.”
“I’ve never done this before,” she says. “My skin has never been in sunlight before.”
He stares at her. “That’s crazy, although I have to say, you have beautiful skin. You can see all your freckles and moles and all. But yeah, if you got the sunscreen on you everywhere, it works really well. Where you missed, your skin will burn.”
“I believe it!”
“Well, yeah. Put it on every couple of hours, you’ll be fine. I’ll help you next time we’re in.”
“Don’t you use it?”
“Oh sometimes, but you know, I’ve got a tan, so I don’t burn anymore. I’ll put some on my nose and lips in the afternoon, especially if I stay out all day.”
“All day?”
“Sure, yeah, that’s the best kind of day.”
“Will you spray me now? I’m scared I’ve missed places or something.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He reaches down and pulls off his fins, walks with her up to her towel, steadying her by the elbow in the soft wet sand. He sprays her everywhere with the sunscreen.
“You have a nice body, so white, you’re like that goddess standing in the shorebreak. Here, let me get your legs and ass too. Can’t miss anywhere, or you’ll burn for sure.”
Burned by the sun! Burned by radiation from a star! She starts to shiver again, tries not to look up. Her shadow stretches toward the water, dark on the light sand. She’s still crying, fist to her mouth. The sand is too bright to look at. There’s just too much light.
He helps her back down into the water. He’s brown and lithe, like some animal not quite human, an aquaman, merman, kelpie, come out of the water to lead her into his element. A water sprite. She’s shivering, but not with cold. Possibly the shock of immersion will keep her from throwing up.
Back ankle deep in the white hissing surge. Here she is, on Earth, walking out into the ocean, in a blast of sunlight. She can hardly believe it. It’s as if she’s living someone else’s life, inside a body she can’t manipulate very well. Kaya helps her keep her feet. He kicks into an onrush of water, which casts an arc of spray back out toward the sea. Bubbles bursting all around, such a liquid sound. She has to shout a little for Kaya to hear her. “It’s not as cold this time!”
“That always happens,” he says with a white grin. “Water’s about twenty-four degrees today, just right. It’ll cool you down after an hour or so, but that’s okay. Here, look, when we get to about thigh deep, the bottom will start going up and down, and when a big enough wave comes in, just let yourself down under it. That’s the best way to get wet. Don’t drag it out too long.”
He holds her hand and they walk over the ripples he mentioned. The waves roll in all broken, hissing, hitting her waist high, then dropping back to thigh high. As a bigger broken wave approaches, Kaya lets go of her hand and with a shout dives under it. She crashes down right after him, the wave pushes her back toward shore, she jumps up shocked by the wetness, crying out at the cold. The water tastes salty but clean, cool in her mouth. It stings her eyes, but not much, and not for long. Kaya is leaning over to drink some of it, then spouts what he’s mouthed into the sky, like a fountain. “Drink a little,” he urges her. “It’s good for you. It’s the same saltiness as in us. We’re getting back in the great mama!” And with another hoot he dives under the next approaching wave and shoots up out of the smoother water behind it. Again she dives too late and is shoved back hard.
He swims in to collect her, swimming around when he could stand. “Pull your fins on your feet. Then dive under the waves. Look, when a wave breaks, some water goes straight to the bottom and then rolls back under, like this,” illustrating with his curling hand. “So if you dive and get in that water, it will pull you under the wave and pop you back up, outside the break. You’ll feel it pull you when you get in that flow.”
She tugs the fins onto her feet as another wave approaches; the waves keep coming one after the next, it’s a perpetual thing, every seven or ten seconds it seems, wave after wave and wave. She dives under the next one, goes down too far and feels the sand of the bottom with her hands, swirling into her face, then she feels the tug of the water back and up, and kicking she feels the fins despite her insensible feet, and shoots back up into the sun. Incredible burst of light in her eyes, salt water in her eyes and nose and mouth, she chokes a little but her eyes barely sting.
“Do you keep your eyes open when you’re under?” she shouts at Kaya.
“Hell yeah,” he says, grinning, all submerged except for his face and shoulders and hair and hands, sliding around her like an otter, taking in a mouthful of foam and shooting it at her playfully.
Then he stands and bobs beside her. “Okay, first game is just to crest the waves as they come in. Stand about chest high; that’s where most of these are breaking. The bigger ones will break farther out, and you have to swim out to the break. The smaller ones won’t break till they’re inside of us here. So, just watch, and as they come to you, jump up into the wave as it rises around you, and let it carry you right up to the break at the top. Let the very top of it break right in your face, crash through that upward, and fall down the back side. That’s already almost as fun as it gets. You’ll feel them lift you. Then, when you’re used to that, and you’ve seen how they tend to break, when a big one has reached you and it’s just about to break, turn when it lifts you and jump in toward the shore. Then it will carry you along, you’ll slide down the front of it on your chest. When you get to the bottom you can stick your head forward and the wave will carry you in a long way, or you can duck and tuck to the side, and fold under the wave and be standing right on your feet again, waist high. Try that for a while.”
She tries it. Waves rise up before her; when they are small and not yet broken she bobs over them, and at the top of her bobbing she can see out to sea, see the incoming waves in lines that keep on coming in one after the next, low and unformed. Sometimes she can see that one will be bigger when it arrives in the shallows, and by the time she sees that, all the other swimmers out there—there are about a dozen now—are swimming hard outward to catch it before it breaks, and if they do, they ride the wave sideways across its face, ahead of the broken part as it moves left or right, their wet faces tilted so their eyes are fixed on the wave rising ahead of their motion. Their bodies are the surfboards, she sees. A few of the wave riders have small foam boards they hold under their chest. They hoot at each other as they ride, and as the break closes over them they disappear into the wave, and the next time she sees them they are already swimming back out to catch another wave.