The waves die down for a while. George and Liz are making small talk atop their boards. I hear them only vaguely. I’m focused on the line, the edge of water and sky, the beginning andthe end. I wait so long, it feels like a meditation. I have the sense of everything expanding. Spirit and soul and body. The space between my ribs. The room in my heart. My mind empties of everything but the ocean’s rolling breath.
I feel like a creature of the sea. Salt on my lips, and salt on my tongue. My hair setting into wet ropes down my back, my scalp gritty with sand. My shoulders are sore, my neck strained. But here, sitting on a board in the Pacific, I feel steady. I’m floating in the ocean, literally adrift, but I feel like I’m home. I feel like my mother’s daughter. For the first time since I can remember, I miss her so sharply that tears spring to my eyes.
And then I see one. A ripple that grows into a glimmering surge. It’s mine.
“This is it, Frankie,” Liz says.
I’ve already turned my board.
I get my body into position by feel rather than by checking my alignment. The wave shoves me, and I grit my teeth, paddling with every ounce of strength I have. I move quickly. One foot, the other, crouch. And then I’m up. On two feet. Flying!
It lasts for one glorious slice of a second before I windmill off the board. My butt hits the sand, but I barely feel it. I’m shaking with laughter. I can hear George and Liz whooping in the distance.
George is already looking for another wave by the time I make it back out. He and Liz are sitting on their boards. His eyes catch on one, and he’s on his stomach, turning his board toward the shore. He looks over his shoulder, then sets his eyes on the beach.
“This one’s for you, Frankie,” he says, and then he paddles,hard, into the wave. Liz and I watch as he leaps into a crouch and then goes shooting off his board.
George gets to his feet, spitting water from his mouth like a fountain.
I think of what he said earlier: No one is going to give me a trophy for how I live my life. There’s no winning—there’s only life.
Liz takes a wave all the way to the beach with a dancer’s grace. But even she has to get off her board. There’s no staying up forever.
When I finally make it to my feet again, it’s on the same wave as George. He falls first. I ride the board to the shore, my eyes on the woman who still sits alone. As I jump from the board and land on my feet, I see her clapping. I smile at her and then I hear George calling for me. Splashing through the water to find me.
“You did it!” he says. “That was amazing. You were up the whole time.”
His arms come around me. My cheek is pressed against his chest. This is what matters. Trying. Being here.
“I did it,” I say, laughing.
Hot tears fall onto my cool cheeks. More salt into the ocean.
Chapter Twenty-six
We pass the rest of the afternoon on the beach in front of the resort. Lounge chairs. Cold beer. Limp bodies. Talk of dinner at the Wickaninnish Inn, which we’ll need to look presentable for later.
I doze off.
I’m alone when I wake up, squinting into a lowering sun. George has put one of the resort’s green-and-white-striped beach towels over my shoulders. His book lays splayed on his chair. It’s almost like we’re kids again, when we’d toggle between swimming and reading on the loungers. George liked magazines—National Geographic,Canadian Geographic,Scientific American—and nature books. I loved novels of all kinds, as long as they were set in faraway places. Even though the Big House was full of books, we’d visit the Lakefield Library almost once a week during the summer, leaving with toppling stacks in our arms.
I picked up a copy ofThe Wickaninnish Cookbook: Rustic Elegance on Nature’s Edgein the resort gift shop in preparation for tonight’s dinner—it’s the first cookbook I’ve bought in years. I skim through it now, salivating over recipes for Haida Gwaii halibut and asparagus, squash blossoms stuffed with spot prawns, and barbecue beach oysters. My expectations are high.
George returns, bearing fizzy cocktails garnished with lemon twists, and dressed in a white shirt and gray pants, his feet bare.
“You look like aBachelorettecontestant,” I say, sitting up straighter and accepting the drink. His top button is undone, and his sleeves are rolled up his forearms.
“Thank you?”
“It’s definitely a compliment,” I confirm. “You look nice.”
He clinks his glass to mine. “To a very successful first day of surfing.”
“To us,” I say, noticing a smudge on his lens.
We take a sip, and then I put down my drink and slip George’s glasses off his nose. He watches me with a funny smile.
“I can do that myself, you know,” he says as I clean them on the hem of my tank top.
