At home, I’ve been Googling big-wave surfing and watching video after video of surfers dropping into mammoth waves. One afternoon, my father found me hypnotized by videos of surfers at Teahupoo. At first, he seemed all set to call Mary, report a relapse, readmit me to the hospital. But after a few seconds, he was sitting beside me, just as riveted as I was at the images of someone flying inside the tunnel of the massive wave.
“Its name means ‘crushing skulls,’” I said without thinking.
My father didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I’m not sure I could have told him if he had. Instead, he studied the way the wave crashed into the ocean, the way the barrel narrowed at its edges, so that even the most skilled surfer had trouble making it out of the tunnel without being pummeled by the water crashing down around him.
After a few minutes, my father said, “I can see how it got that name.”
Now he puts his arm around me gently. He seems almost as fascinated by the surfers here as I am. I wonder if he’s thinking of John and Michael, of the years they spent surfing this beach before they ran off in search of bigger and better waves.
If my parents were to forbid me from ever picking up a surfboard, I would understand why. How could they be sure that I wouldn’t disappear just like John and Michael, drawn in by the waves’ siren song?
But much to my surprise, my father says, “Feels good to be back on the beach, doesn’t it?”
I nod. “It does.”
“We’ll have to start coming here more often,” he says carefully. For a second, my mother looks stricken, but slowly, unexpectedly, a smile spreads across her face.
I think she must feel the same way I do. Like me, she feels closest to John and Michael when she’s near the water.
36
I get very good at waiting. I wait as I dutifully go to my outpatient therapy with Mary each week, talk about my feelings and answer questions and go through the five stages of grief for my brothers like I’m checking them off a to-do list. I wait until Fiona can laugh when I joke that I’m finally seeing a grief counselor, just like she wanted me to months ago. I wait until I can honestly say that the counseling helps; she was right after all. I wait until my parents have agreed that I can start college in January; they’ve ironed everything out with Stanford, I’ll just matriculate one semester late. I wait until my mother lets me take the car and drive myself to therapy, alone. I wait until she’s actually sent me out on errands by myself: pick up a dozen eggs, the dry cleaning, a tube of toothpaste. I wait until the weather turns cooler and the days are shorter, until I can speak about my brothers in the past tense without tripping over the words. I wait until my parents trust me. Only then do I take the car—a fresh, new, shiny SUV my parents bought for me to take to college, a belated graduation gift, so normal and unsurprising—and drive to Kensington Beach.
I drive there because I have to see it for myself. I drive there because even now, all this time later, I wake up every morning and think I’m somewhere else. Every morning, I think I’m in Kensington.
The roads are familiar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Mary and her colleagues all conceded that I probably did make my way to the gated community that was once called Kensington Beach at some point during my psychosis. Fiona Googled the place and told me what I already knew: that it was a popular beachside housing development in the 1980s but had long since been abandoned. No one lives there now. It’s not safe. The only reason they haven’t torn the houses down is the cliffs aren’t stable enough for tractors and trailers to park there, let alone lug away debris. The place itself is unstable. Just like me.
Now I wonder how I found it; my GPS stops working short of the turn that leads me up the cliffs. In fact, according to my GPS, I’m driving straight into the ocean.
I pull into the driveway of what would have been Jas’s house. It’s there, just like I remember it, but instead of looking like it received a fresh coat of paint a few months ago, the exterior of the house is beat-up, the paint peeling and chipped. There’s graffiti all over the garage door, and when I try the front door, prepared to break a window to get inside if I have to, it’s unlocked.
The house is empty. There isn’t a single piece of furniture inside. There’s more graffiti on the interior walls, but it’s completely illegible. On one wall, someone has drawn a surfer taking a massive wave. It looks exactly like the picture I saw on the bench when I waited for the bus. There’s some trash on the floor. I take a deep breath, as though maybe there will be some trace of the scents I associate with Jas, but the place smells vaguely of stale beer and pot, like maybe some kids crashed here while they surfed the waves on the beach below. Or maybe they were just looking for a place to party, completely unaware of the waves at all.
At least the house is shaped like I remember it, a mirror image of Pete’s, perched on the cliffs on the other side of Kensington. I head for the garage, remembering the collection of surfboards I saw there the first time I saw Jas. Maybe there will be some trace of him there at least.
But there is nothing; just another empty room.
I walk out through the front door and head down the overgrown road that will lead to Pete’s house. When I see it, I break into a run. Maybe some of Pete’s crew still lives here; maybe Hughie or Matt is waiting just on the other side of the door.
But the house is a mess; it reeks of mildew, as if a wave rose up from the ocean below and drenched the place. The sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard are wide open; a few seagulls are hopping around the living room. They’ve made this house their home. The tile floors that were always gleamingly white, where Pete laid out a blanket and we all ate the dinner I cooked, are covered with feathers and droppings. The birds caw at me in protest as I make my way to the backyard, toward the one thing here that’s familiar: the sound of the waves.
The cliffs fall so straight and so sharp that I take a step back, afraid I might fall. The rocks are jagged and toothlike. It’d be impossible to build stairs into these cliffs. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.
Because below me, there is no beach. The water comes right up to the cliffs. There is no perfect triangle of white sand. The waves are rough and choppy, driving themselves directly into the wall of rocks, spray colliding with stone. To surf them would be certain death.
It’s as if the ocean has swallowed my memories whole.
I stop at Fiona’s on the drive home. I’d told my parents that I was going there when I left the house this morning, and of course they believed me, now that I’m back to normal.
Fiona’s home from school for the weekend—she left for college at the usual time in September, like everyone else—and after months away, she’s thrilled to see me out on my own.
“You look so good, Wen,” she squeals as we hug hello.
I laugh, but Fiona shakes her head.
“No, I mean seriously. I don’t know, ever since this summer … I mean, you even looked pretty that morning you showed up here, stoned out of your mind.”
“Now I know you’re just being nice.”
“I’m not,” Fiona insists. “Really.”
I put my arms around my best friend and hug her again as she oohs and aahs over my new car. I let her drive it down from her house in the hills when we go out to dinner. I roll the windows down and breathe in the scent of the eucalyptus trees that line her neighborhood, erasing any trace of the ocean.
I’m tempted to apologize to her, to tell her she was right all along. But instead I listen as she tells me about her breakup with Dax, about the cute guy who lives on her floor in the dorm, about the professor she has a crush on, about the sorority she’s decided to pledge.