The Noah Confessions (15 page)

I had always worried about dating—right up until this moment, in fact—because I knew my father wouldn't be able to tell me how to do it. He wouldn't be able to tell me how to recognize the right guy. He wouldn't like anyone I brought home. He might even forbid me to do it. He might say, “We're not like that,” or “We're not from here,” or “You're all I have.”

So I tried to imagine what my mother would have said about dating and about Mick in particular.

I could almost hear her, but I knew it was really my own voice speaking for her.

Find someone special and don't settle. Find him and stay focused. Find more than one and learn what you have to learn and when you've learned enough, get married and stay that way.

I smiled suddenly because these sentences crossed a line where they didn't feel like mine anymore. Maybe she had always been talking to me. And I was learning how to listen.

What about Mick? I asked her.

I didn't hear anything except a loud sucking sound.

He had reached the bottom of his orange-raspberry drink. We both laughed at the awkwardness.

“Do people ever treat you weird?” he asked. “I mean, because of her.”

“They did when I was little. Now it's like a status symbol.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. It's strange at Hillsboro. We don't get to wear regular clothes and we don't have boys, so we find other things to be competitive about. Like grades and ancestors and strange history.”

He laughed. “In public school, it's just the usual crap. Sneakers and iPods and you talked to my girl, I'll see you in the parking lot.”

“And drugs, right? And people having sex in the bathrooms.”

He laughed. “Yeah, just a bunch of losers with no plans for the future.”

I felt my face turning red. “No, I didn't mean that.”

“Sure you did. We know that's how you see us.”

“Well, you think we're all spoiled and stupid.”

He shook his head. “Just spoiled. But you're different.”

I thought about it. “I wasn't all that different. Until recently.”

“What changed?”

“That kind of falls in the dead-mother category.”

“Oh,” he said.

We looked into our empty drink cups.

“Want another?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

He glanced at his watch and said, “Is it over? I mean, the juice date.”

I thought about it. I probably needed to get home. But I was worried I had not left enough of an impression on him. I hadn't proven I was more than a spoiled private school girl.

“The juice portion of the date might be over,” I said. “But I want to take you somewhere.”

“Where? Back to the cemetery?”

“No. Much better. But it depends on how game you are,” I said.

“Oh, I'm game. I'm nothing but game.”

“When do you have to be home?”

“Whenever I get there. Mom doesn't get back till ten tonight. She's got the late shift.”

“Then I have an idea.”

Because I did. It was a crazy idea, but sometimes the crazier the idea, the better.

That's what my mom would have told me.

It was time to have a backbone.

Maybe I was weird and superficial and confused, but the least I could do was have some courage. I could be brave. Like her.

• 2 •

We rode the bus down to Ocean Boulevard and took the long stairs down the Palisades bluff and the long bridge across Pacific Coast Highway. The sun was low over the water and the beach was empty.

The swell was big. I could tell that from the parking lot. The waves were at least twice as high as when Jen and I were out there. That scared me for a moment, but it was too late to lose my nerve. Besides, I figured, more room to stand up and ride. Weren't the big waves supposed to be good?

“The beach,” Mick said. “Very romantic move. Are we getting in the water? Because it looks pretty cold.”

“Watch this.”

I grabbed his hand and led him over to a stand that rented boards and wet suits.

“I'll take that board there,” I said, pointing. “What is that, an eight-point-oh? That'll do. And a wet suit.”

The guy took my money and looked at Mick.

“How about you, dude?”

“I'm not actually a dude. I'm very land-based. I'll be a spectator.”

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “Because I can teach you. I learned in a day.”

“Not for beginners out there today,” said the surfer dude.

“Yeah, I'll play it safe,” Mick said. “But I want to see you.”

“You know what you're doing, right?” the dude asked me.

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

I had to change in the public bathroom because I hadn't been smart enough to bring a bathing suit. Well, smart didn't come into it. I was being impulsive and I wasn't used to living that way.

I stared into the mirror and my face was white with fear.

What the hell was I doing?

But the idea of getting into the water and standing on it made my stomach calm down. Mick was going to see the new me, the person I had every intention of being from now on. Not spoiled, not scared, someone who knew how to live, enough to make up for my mother and the red-haired girl down the well. I was going to make it count.

Mick said I looked hot in the wet suit and I just laughed and hoisted the board on my hip and chattered nervously as we walked toward the water.

“My dad says it's one of the true curiosities of Los Angeles that the community willingly turns the most valuable real estate over to the homeless. He says you'd never find people sleeping on the beach in Martha's Vineyard. Bag ladies or drug dealers in the Hamptons. That's not how it goes other places.”

“It's good,” Mick said. “The rich people are willing to share.”

“My dad says it's because they are afraid of the sun.”

“Yeah, probably. They're afraid of most things.” Then he added, “Not you.”

There were only a half dozen surfers out there. The good ones. The shortboarders. The guys who didn't put on a wet suit until January.

Jen was nowhere in sight.

In fact, there wasn't a girl in sight.

Except me. Standing there next to Mick, who might have been one of those afraid-of-the-beach people from the way he was responding to his surroundings.

We were in Santa Monica next to the pier, where the surf was usually on the small side, even if there was a swell in. But not today.

It was a shore break, which meant the waves formed and then delivered themselves directly onto the beach. Not like a point break, where the waves form far out in the water at an angle and are often slow and deliberate. A shore break is always harder because you have to paddle directly into the big white water, and the wave closes out faster, giving you less time to stand up. The advantage to the shore break was that the waves were smaller. But not today.

“Whoa,” he said. “Are the waves always this big?”

“No. There's a swell.”

“You're really going in?”

“I'll be fine,” I told him, with no evidence to support it.

He stood there in his jeans and sneakers and his fatigue jacket, smiling.

The sun was starting its slow descent over the ocean. I knew I only had a few minutes to get this thing done.

While I was contemplating that, he stepped closer to me and leaned his head to one side. It looked like he was going to ask me a question but instead he put his lips right next to mine and I wasn't sure what he was doing and then I realized he was going to kiss me.

I jumped back as if I had been burned.

It wasn't graceful.

He straightened up and just stared at me. He blushed a little, but otherwise he was waiting for me to explain.

“I can't.”

That was all I could say.

“Okay” was his response.

“It's not you, it's me.”

“Okay. I just felt like doing that. I took a chance. It's really okay.”

“I like you, Mick.”

“But not like that. I get it.”

“No, like that. Exactly like that. I just…can't.”

He waited.

I had no idea what to say. Maybe I have a secret. Maybe I'm related to a criminal. Maybe my mother wasn't who I thought she was and I've never done a courageous thing in my life. Yet.

But I knew I couldn't let him kiss anyone but the person who was on the right path.

So I said, “I have to get in the water. I never kiss before that.”

Which was technically true. It had never been an issue before. Now, suddenly, it was a policy.

“Later, then. Something to look forward to,” he said.

“Right.”

So I attached the leash to my leg and grabbed my board and ran into the waves and away from the only thing on earth that scared me more than kissing him.

         

Paddling out was a bitch, but I stayed on my board out of pure pride. A couple of times I had to turtle, which I really didn't know how to do, but I taught myself. For those of you wondering, turtling is when you actually flip over and turn upside down on your board as a wave breaks on you. Why would any sane person do that, you ask? We're not talking about sane people. We're talking about surfers. Surfers do it to keep from getting pummeled by the white water and to keep the board from flying out from under them and hitting another surfer. It's never cool to ditch your board, which is everyone's first instinct when they see a wall of crashing white water heading toward them. But it's a serious violation of surfer etiquette and fights have been known to break out. Jen had taught me all of this. I wasn't turtling out of any respect for my fellow surfers; I was doing it to impress Mick. But there were worse reasons to do things and certainly worse ways to learn.

After I had turtled a couple of times I felt brave. The real kind of courage that I was searching for, the kind that my mother had had and that I wanted to know more about. No, not the same kind. Just the beginning of it.

The waves were bigger than I could possibly explain and coming hard and fast. But I was determined. There was courage to be had out there in the water and I intended to take some home with me.

I got past the break zone and the water got a little bit flat between sets, but I could see the set forming in the distance.

Waves come in sets, you see. Most people don't know that, because they don't have to. Waves come in groups of six or seven. And it varies, the amount of time between sets. Because it was a big day, there wasn't much downtime between onslaughts.

I didn't have much room to get my wits about me. I straddled my board and saw Mick standing on the shore, watching. He looked smaller from this distance but just as cute, the way he had one foot on top of the other, the one hand shading his eyes and the other shoved in his pocket, and I imagined he was nervous on my behalf. I was going to show him. By God, when I was done, he was going to see something worth kissing. And my father would see someone who could rival my mother. And I would see it, too, and then I would be on my way.

I felt the wave before I saw it. I took one quick glance over my shoulder and it was on me and I started paddling faster than I ever had before. The wave lifted me up and I was high above the horizon and I was standing up before I knew it. I had this awesome moment of exhilaration and that sense of magic you get when it seems as if you're walking on water. I felt like I could do anything. I saw the shore moving toward me and I heard the roaring sound of the wave and I was all alone out there and I was the master of my universe. I was invincible. I had to reach for more.

So I started walking on my board. Like turtling, it was something I had never tried before. But I had seen Jen do it and I knew it was an advanced move. I took tiny steps at first and then got braver. I was getting close to the nose and I was thinking of Mick watching me, though I couldn't look at him, could only stare at the rails on my board, and I heard the sound of my breath pounding and competing with the roar of the wave. My heart was beating so hard I thought it might break through and I wanted to cry from the excitement and the triumph of it all.

And then it happened.

I don't know how it happened, just that it did.

I probably lost my footing. Or the wave turned or I turned. The nose of the board went down. I got all caught up in my success and forgot to stay in the moment. There are thousands of possibilities, but in hindsight, they don't matter. What matters is that I fell.

I fell hard. It took forever and it wasn't pretty. There was some flailing involved. My limbs felt like they didn't belong to me anymore, as if they might separate and go shooting off in all directions. I saw my board flying away from me and I was airborne and the ocean was waiting to swallow me whole. Even in that moment between the board and the water I was thinking about how it looked to Mick and I knew how it looked. It looked ridiculous. It looked like failure.

The ocean opened its mouth and sucked me in. I turned and tumbled like socks in a dryer and I couldn't tell up from down. I remembered Jen talking about this and some of that knowledge came back to me. The books said to relax and wait to be delivered. It said not to fight. So I didn't fight. I just tumbled. My head hit the sand and possibly a rock. I felt dizzy and I thought I might vomit or faint. I came up briefly and then another wave crashed on me and I went down again into the murky darkness and that's close to the last thing I remember.

The very last thing I remember, though, was everything getting still and I had a sense that it was all over one way or another. I was floating upside down and I could see the water and eventually the sky above me but I couldn't stand up. I couldn't because I was tied down to the bottom. I looked at my leg and saw that my leash was caught on a rock. I struggled to take my leash off but my fingers were weak and slippery and then I stopped trying and just stared at the watery sky and waited for the rest of my story.