Blue (22 page)

It took him ages to get position again, and just as he'd figured out the line-up I heard someone calling my name. I turned.

Zeke.

Fresh from his session at Great Western Beach, with his orange longboard under his arm. It was one of his favorite boards, a super-fast gun shaped by his mother.

“Wow, check out the set from Tibet! Totally knew it was breaking,” he said. “There were these insane ripples in my Styrofoam coffee cup just now. Boom, would you listen to that!”

And then before I could say a word, his eyes fixed on the small figure out at sea waiting for the next set of waves to come in.

“Damn, someone's riding it?”

“Daniel,” I said.

He sighed an awful sigh. Just like his whole chest deflated.

Daniel was just sitting on his board deep outside, resting after the violence of the axing, maybe trying to stop his brain from freaking out. He didn't go for any other waves, and for the time being at least he was safe.

Zeke said, “Is he even wearing a flotation vest?”

“He's not wearing anything. The wave ripped his clothes off.”

Garrett and Wes were coming around the headland, carrying shortboards and stuffing their faces with chips.

They could see something was wrong.

“Cribbar bombin', eh? Who's out there?” Garrett asked.

“Some kid trying to be the big kahuna.”

“Some kid?” Wes asked, looking at me.

Zeke didn't tell them it was Daniel. Unfortunately it must have been written across my face.

“Not Knife Boy?” Garrett said, looking from me to Zeke.

Zeke just shrugged.

“Iris,” Garrett said, “is that the psycho gremmie who tried to kill our little brother?”

I nodded.

Wes exhaled and shook his head. “What the heck is he thinking?”

“He's not thinking,” I replied.

Garrett ate another handful of chips. “Bummer for him. The little squid's gonna be sea froth.”

“Iris, you have a cell phone?”

I shook my head, mentally kicking myself for not bringing it with me. Zeke and his brothers obviously didn't have one either, as they'd just been surfing and no one in their right mind left expensive belongings on the beach while they went in the water.

“OK, where's the nearest emergency phone?” Zeke said, walking to the edge of the cliff.

“There's two: North Fistral and Little Fistral. Wait a minute . . . one of them's broken,” I said, vaguely remembering an “Out of Service” sign. I racked my brains, but couldn't remember where I'd seen it. “I dunno which one. We'll have to try both.”

Zeke said, “Wes, you go to Little Fistral. Garrett, you run around to the main beach.”

“You're not going in there,” Garrett said. “He's made his decision. Let him be.”

“In about two minutes he's going to paddle for a wave and wipe out, because these sets coming in right now . . . ? Those waves are not makeable. Too hollow, too ledgy, too choppy, boils bubbling up on the face that will stop his board dead and send his ass sailing to the wind.”

“His choice, brah.”

“He might make it,” I said. “He's survived two.”

“No. This set right here is all wrong. But out back, where he's paddling, he won't be able to see how they're jacking up. Teahupo'o is more ridable than this.”

“Don't,” I said, so choked up I could hardly speak.

“Just get to a phone and call the lifeguard and an ambulance,” Zeke said to Garrett and Wes. “Now.”

I couldn't take my eyes away from the water. The deep rumble of the breaking waves was so loud that I could feel their vibration through my whole body.

Zeke walked toward the cliff. I grabbed his arm to stop him, and he turned to me and said, “He's gonna need help, and who else is there?”

“Wait for the lifeguard.”

I said wait, and yet my heart wanted him to go out there and save Daniel. To make everything all right again. To put it all back to the way it had been.

Zeke just looked at me with those beautiful blue eyes, and it was like he could read my mind. Then he committed.

“Stupid freakin' kook,” he said.

At the edge of the cliff, he turned back to me, and I said, “I love you, Zeke.”

“Love you too.”

Then he was gone.

He paddled out, taking nice fluid strokes like he was just going out to any other normal wave.

Garrett was running toward me, steaming back from the emergency phone and I knew that within twenty minutes a lifeboat would be in the water and approaching the headland. With every heartbeat, though, it seemed more and more likely that I was about to lose the only two boys I had ever loved.

I saw the moment when Daniel spotted Zeke coming around the break, and he must have known what he was there for. Daniel had been taking a breather, psyching himself up to overcome that defense mechanism that stopped a person from doing crazy suicidal shit, whatever, but as soon as he saw Zeke, it was like he was electrocuted into action and he started stroking hard, too late, way too late, to catch a wave that had passed a few seconds before.

Zeke was taller than Daniel and he had this graceful paddle style in the water, super-fast and efficient, and he started dropping in further down the wave on the shoulder, away from the peak, so that Daniel would back down. He'd have to. Otherwise he'd risk taking the full weight of Zeke's board. It just wasn't worth the risk.

Daniel kept going, paddling to get enough speed to take off. Zeke, by this time, was a couple of yards to his right, burning through the water like his life depended on it. Daniel popped up at the exact moment that Zeke got to his feet. Both of them were up and riding, but both were too late to drop in on the wave face. Zeke cut back and turned his board slightly toward Daniel, going against every rule of surfing etiquette that he'd lived by so religiously his whole life. Taking control, like the pro that he was, but this time he was also trying to save Daniel's life. Zeke's arm shot out, fist bunched, and caught Daniel in the chest, sending him off the back of the wave, where he'd be safe.

Zeke, though, was nearer to the falling lip of the wave than he'd thought.

I saw Zeke's orange board, pointing the wrong way, get sucked over the falls. Attached at the ankle, Zeke followed his board and was pulled over the wave, nothing he could do to stop it.

I closed my eyes.

Garrett had arrived and was roaring by my side, already running for the cliff-ledge. I grabbed him and he shook me off like I was so much trash.

The wave didn't pick Zeke up like the other wave that had grabbed Daniel and sent him down in the lip. Seconds stretched out like hours and all I could think was:
air
. He needed to swim like hell for the surface and get some air. But I knew that down deep you didn't know where you were, didn't even know which way was up. I remembered Zeke telling me about giant waves he'd ridden, where the wipeout was so fearsome and his back was hyperextended so far that he'd thought he was paralyzed.

“When you panic, you make stupid mistakes,” he'd told me. “It's all about staying calm, staying loose and believing you'll get through it.”

“It's so dangerous,” I said. “Macho bullshit. Why do it? Why risk everything?”

And now, here he was, in the grip of the most hideous wipeout I had ever seen.

The board didn't surface and neither did Zeke. He wasn't wearing a life vest either. There was nothing to engage and send him like a cork to the surface. There was too much water exploding over him; he couldn't fight his way up.

The wave had passed and another was forming, and still Zeke hadn't come to the surface.

And then Daniel came sailing over the next monster wave, totally oblivious of what had happened to Zeke. This wave was a little smaller than the first, but Daniel was all over the place. Too jerky, his board rearing up, and way too much speed. The bottom fell out of the wave. He was thrown off the front.

I thought of the calmness. The moment of calm when I first met Zeke, lying in the ballroom of Hotel Serenity, looking at twinkling stars.

I thought of the day Daniel had joined my school, riding up on his skateboard like he didn't have a care in the world.

Garrett was in the water now, streaming through the swell, under-gunned in his tiny shortboard that wasn't at all suitable for such crazy conditions. That was when I committed.

I could do it. I'd been practicing my yoga routine every day. I knew how to calm my mind, and my body was stronger than it had ever been.

If Zeke and Daniel were dead because of me, I couldn't go on. I had to fix it. I didn't have a board with me, so I walked away from the cliff-edge, then turned and ran at it and went sailing over the top, just clearing the slashing rocks below.

As soon as I cleared the froth, I saw that half a board was tombstoning not far from me, and much further away again a figure had popped up, a head and shoulders. Gasping, spitting salt-snot.

It was Daniel.

Zeke was still down.

Garrett was ahead of me, not far from Daniel. The half-submerged board had come up only after Garrett had swum over it. He never knew his brother was down there, trapped, fighting to get free of his leash. He had been down too long. There was no way to hold your breath that long. Not even for Zeke, who had practiced free-diving in the Maldives, sitting on the ocean floor alongside the kaleidoscopic fishes as he held his breath for three minutes. Possible if you're calm. Impossible in this kind of beating.

Before Garrett had even turned, I dived down, using every ounce of the new strength in my arms to follow the board's leash, hand over hand like I was climbing a rope, only downward. Then I felt a handful of soft hair.

His body was moving gently, anchored as it was by the urethane leash which had wound tight around an anvil-shaped boulder. It was murky, but up close I could just about see how the leash had snagged. I shook it with everything I had, but there was no way I could loosen it. I didn't know if Zeke's eyes were open because I couldn't bring myself to look at his face.

The sea would not take him. With my lungs on the brink of exploding and the force of a broken wave rushing over us, I worked my hands down his body, only just stopping myself from springing up to the surface, and I took hold of the Velcro strap around his ankle and released the leash.

I gripped Zeke around the waist and let the air in my body take us up.

Garrett was right there to take hold of Zeke; behind him, I watched Wes dive from the rocks into the sea. I turned around and saw Daniel swimming toward us, his face a mask of panic.

Three words looped around and around my brain.

Zeke is dead
.

Two days later, his board washed up with the sunrise. Relentless waves had eventually split the board in two and dislodged Zeke's leg-rope from the boulder. The pieces floated ashore with a mass stranding of tiny white jellyfish. My knees buckled. The palms of my hands burned. The swell had died like it was never there and I looked right past the headland, out to where the Cribbar breaks.

It was like an inshore lake. Nothing. No sign of what had happened that terrible morning.

The gannets were diving far out in the bay, sending up plumes of spray, and behind me I could hear London voices say that it was dolphins' breaths, water spray chucked out by the blowholes. But they were wrong. It was just birds pulling out fish after fish after fish.

They talked like nothing was wrong, wrapped up in their own worlds and oblivious to what was happening ten feet
from them. Not understanding the significance of this broken surfboard.

A few weeks after I first met him, Zeke had told me, “A leash snagged on underwater rocks is every big-wave rider's nightmare. After a bad wipeout, a leash can be a lifeline or a death sentence. Down in the deep water where it's so dark, you're disorientated and you don't know which way is up, so if push comes to shove you can literally climb your leg-rope, because it's attached to something that is way more buoyant than you are: a board. And odds are that your board is floating on the surface. I've climbed my leash to the surface and it's saved my life, given me that one precious mouthful of air, which is all it takes to survive. But if that leash is snagged on underwater rocks? And you can't pull it free, or get it off your ankle? You're a goner. You're holding your breath as best you can, twenty feet down, or forty feet down if a second wave has broken on top of you. You try pulling off your ankle leash then, with the current pinning your body. It's like doing a stomach crunch with an elephant sitting on your chest.”

This conversation came back to me with such clarity that dread rose through my body. I just stood there, looking at the pieces of his board, one at my feet, the other a hundred yards down the beach.

Surfing was rough and Zeke never, ever, went easy on himself. I knew the scars that marked his surfboards as well as I knew the ones on his body. I recognized everything: his board-waxing pattern, the replacement fins, and the small ding that he'd fixed with epoxy resin. I'd been there when he put his mouth to the hole and sucked out the saltwater.

That orange board was like a bright lamp in the gray early-morning water. A little bit of
aloha
in Cornwall.

I couldn't stop crying.

I carried the halves of his board over my head as if they were a coffin. No one helped me, no one stopped me.

I made a quick stop at my place, and then I went to Daniel's house.

I placed the two pieces of surfboard on the concrete outside Daniel's front door and then I knocked hard, staring at the flaking blue paint without blinking.

He opened the door and gave me a look of such pain that I almost turned around.

“They just washed up,” I said.

He stooped to pick up one of the pieces, and he turned it over in his hands, respectful and somber like he was touching a dead body.

His shoulders sagged and he placed the piece back down on its other half.

“I'm sorry.”

I shook my head at him.

On the way back from the beach, I'd stopped back at my place as I knew there was something that could do what my words
couldn't. In a bag hooked on my wrist I had an old Nike shoebox that was so full the lid barely stayed on.

I handed Daniel the box and he opened it, looking down into it.

It was everything. I'd kept all of the bits of jewelry that Daniel had bought me for Christmas and birthdays. Even after I met Zeke, I kept that stuff. Beaded bracelets and necklaces that Daniel bought me when we were falling in love with each other. I even had a cardboard case from an old deck of cards where I kept all the ticket stubs from cinema trips, as well as receipts from coasteering and all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut lunches. Daniel had no idea how sentimental I was. None at all. I never let it show, because I didn't want him to realize the power he had over me. Which was a joke. As if he didn't know all about that.

I had been so weak. Back then, I had loved him so much that it caused me physical pain whenever I was away from him for more than five minutes. On one school science trip to Bodmin Moor, where we weren't allowed phones or computers, I wrote Daniel a letter every single day, kissing the envelope before posting it.

Daniel glanced into the shoebox and looked at me. He hadn't kept anything like that. Of course he hadn't. What he meant to me, I had never meant to him. We were two people in one relationship but it wasn't the same one. I'd thought he was parasiting off my strength, but it was the other way around: I'd been addicted to his pain.

And look what I had allowed to happen. Look how reckless he'd become, because I had encouraged him to be that way, with my head in the sand and constant excuse-making.

Daniel had not meant to hurt anyone else. He hadn't meant for Zeke to drown. He couldn't have known Zeke would show up and try to save him. But Daniel was toxic. And I had made him worse.

“I'm so sorry, Iris. For everything I ever done.”

Then he added, “I never meant to hurt anyone,” like it was the most important thing in the world that I believed that. “I'll always love you, Ris. You know that.”

I couldn't answer him. The lump in my throat burned so fiercely that I could barely swallow.

I looked straight into Daniel's eyes, those lovely dark eyes framed with black lashes, and I felt the strength go out of my legs. I put up a hand to support myself, took a deep breath and said, “Have a good life, Daniel. Be happy.” And then I turned on my heel and I didn't look back.