Wish

by Joseph Monninger

  Tommy could hardly contain himself. He made a little wiggle motion on the bed. I had only seen him do that once or twice in his life.

  “It must have been cruising around,” Tommy said, his breath wheezy. “Bee’s Knees saw it, too. It looks like it was coming right at us.”

  “I’ll never go into the water again,” Mom said, playing her role up a little.

  “It is sooooo rare,” Tommy said. “I mean, one in about one hundred million.”

  “You have a better chance of winning the lottery,” Ty said. “Trust me, I know.”

  After that, Tommy made them run the footage back and forth about a thousand times. My mom asked me to come help her and we went and ordered two pizzas for breakfast from the small shop in the hospital. We got sodas, too. When we carried everything back, a few of the nurses had come in to look at the footage. Tommy was crazy happy. One of the nurses said they should send the footage to the local news program. Little Brew agreed, except he said Ollie had already posted it to YouTube.

  “Snow Pony is swimming with the man,” Little Brew said, his voice revving Tommy up again. “That shark was looking for you, buddy.”

  “You have some weird shark mojo,” Tommy told Ty. “You’re a shark magnet.”

  “Bee said it was big, too,” Little Brew said. “Like triple the Jet Ski at least.”

  We had pizza and watched some more footage. Ollie had some earlier filming spliced in and the boys surfed beautifully, scraping down the side of a few huge sets. The new segment wasn’t accompanied by music, but the old video had music by Anthrax, a mega-hard-rock band that made the entire thing feel a little frantic. Ollie cut in some Hawaiian music, too, and that made the surf scenes seem surreal and funny after all the crash-metal stuff. It was pretty good filmmaking. Ollie had a nice eye and the surf footage was compelling all on its own.

  “You’ll send me all the footage, right?” Tommy asked when Ty and Little Brew were getting ready to leave. They had each eaten three slices of pizza.

  “Sure, of course,” Ty said. “We’ll mail it this week.”

  “You’re like a YouTube star,” Little Brew said. “It’s already going viral.”

  Tommy got quiet. It was clear he didn’t want them to go. I didn’t want them to go, either. But the doctors had already said he could leave the hospital that afternoon. My mom, to her credit, tried to make the goodbye smooth while the guys did a handshake-shoulder-bump-thing with Tommy. It didn’t make sense to delay any longer. We were heading back to San Francisco once Tommy got released.

  “I know you guys put yourselves out for me,” Tommy said, his voice knotty with breath and lung gunk. “I want you to know I appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” Ty said. “I’m glad I finally got to meet you.”

  “This was the best time of my life,” Tommy said the way only he could say it, all heart and vulnerability.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said. “I’d like to get some air, anyway.”

  They hugged Tommy one last time. Then they hugged Mom. Ty touched the surfboard as he went out. I couldn’t quite read his expression. Cali boys. Tommy’s best friends. Maybe Tommy’s only friends.

  “I made this for you,” Little Brew said as we stood in front of the hospital.

  He handed me a hemp necklace with a cowry shell in the center and two blue-gray beads on each side.

  “So that you remember California,” he said.

  “I’ll remember California.”

  “And me, I hope.”

  “And you,” I said. “You most of all.”

  I held the necklace up to my throat and turned around. Little Brew attached the clasp. His hands trailed on my neck as I turned back to face him.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I’m glad we met, Bee. Maybe I’ll come out to New Hampshire one of these days. I have an uncle who lives in Boston.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “And maybe I could come out here sometime.”

  He smiled. “And we can e-mail.”

  He pulled me closer and we kissed. It was a perfect kiss—tender, passionate, and lingering. As we came apart, I still couldn’t quite believe that this beautiful boy liked me.

  I waved to Ty. He had the van running. He waved back. Little Brew trotted around the front of the van and climbed into the passenger side. They had two surfboards secured to the top. As they pulled away, Little Brew leaned across Ty and shouted something. I didn’t quite catch what he said. I waved goodbye, the sun bright in my eyes. It was only after they had put on their blinker and slid off into the traffic that I pieced together what Little Brew had said.

  Look up, he had shouted, reminding me of the stars.

  A shark killed a swimmer the next morning. It happened miles away, much farther south, the first shark-attack death off San Diego in more than half a century. Experts blamed it on a great white. A group of marathon swimmers had been out for an early training swim about a hundred yards off a San Diego beach when the last swimmer got knocked into the air and yelled, “Shark!”

  Then he went under. By the time two swimmers came back and helped him to the beach, blood had already geysered out of his leg. One of the men said he had felt the blood, warmer than the water, pouring past him as it jetted from his friend’s body. The shark, they said, did not re-appear, although they expected a second attack at any moment.

  They pulled the victim to a rocky cove and someone ran for the lifeguards, who returned in a beach cart and took the injured man to get help. By that time, unfortunately, the man had already died from a severed artery in his leg. The authorities closed the beach and sent out choppers to scout the area for the shark. An alert went up and down the coastline, because great whites were known to patrol the area. Most experts concluded that the shark had seen the silhouette of the swimmer and had mistaken him for a seal. Typical of a great white attack, the shark had picked the trailing member of the group and had come up at a forty-five-to ninety-degree angle. As powerful as a great white can be, it still relies on ambush.

  Standing in front of breaking surf, the television reporter explained how exceedingly rare such an attack was. He was a young guy with an open collar. He kept turning to look over his shoulder at the water, as if he could make a shark appear. At the same time he seemed glad to be on solid land. The wind pushed his hair around.

  We watched the report on an airport television. It was after we had checked the surfboard, which Tommy and I had carried between us. People had come over to ask about the bite mark. Tommy was crazy proud to show it off and tell them Ty’s story. Invariably, everyone touched the board. The whole thing tied together. Tommy and Ty and sharks in the water. It was strange that way.

  We checked the surfboard only after Tommy made the baggage staff wrap it with foam padding. He was determined not to let the board get dinged.

  “Okay,” he said when it was good and tight.

  The baggage lady needed help from another person to put the surfboard on the conveyor belt. Then it disappeared through a black rubber-curtained hatch.

  My mom checked us in and we had about an hour and a half to kill before our flight, so we went to an airport restaurant and had chicken sandwiches. We had eaten about half of our meal when the shark-attack report came on for what was probably a second or third time that day. When Mom saw Tommy and me staring at the TV, she turned and watched, too.

  “Oh, goodness,” Mom said, her voice tight, “can that be the same shark?”

  “Could be,” Tommy said, his jaw set. “No way to know.”

  “Could it get that far that fast?” Mom asked.

  “Probably not,” Tommy said. “Probably it’s all just a coincidence. It’s weird, though. I wonder if Ty and Little Brew have heard about it.”

  I moved my eyes back and forth between Tommy and the television. I could tell that this attack was hitting him differently than the ones that had come before. This one wasn’t theoretical. He had been in the ocean with a shark, and
in rough water, at that, the bottom a million miles below, the big, scary thing patrolling around his legs. He had seen a shark, maybe, pointed toward him. So he stopped eating as he watched the television. When the report ended, he shook his head.

  “That’s just bizarre,” he said. “Especially after what happened to us.”

  “It could have been either of you two,” Mom said. “That’s what hits me.”

  “It’s their season,” he said. “They have to put on weight or they won’t survive. You can’t blame them. They’re just doing what they need to do.”

  “But to possibly be eaten …,” Mom said.

  “Yes, can you imagine how scared the swimmer must have been?” I asked.

  “The sharks have a right to exist, too,” Tommy said, his eyes a little glassy. “When you go into the ocean, you go into their world. They don’t come on land and get us. And when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

  Mom looked at me. I knew she suspected that Tommy was talking about himself. I wondered that, too.

  He didn’t talk any more and we didn’t see another report about the attack.

  “You tired?” I asked Tommy as the plane flew somewhere over the Midwest.

  It was dark outside. Mom sat across the aisle. This time she hadn’t flirted with anyone. She did her Sudoku puzzles until Nebraska, then fell asleep. The puzzle book lay open on her belly.

  Tommy didn’t answer. He sat by the window, looking out. The light on the top of the wing sometimes threw shadows on him. A bag of peanuts lay scattered on the fold-down table in front of him.

  “That board is going to look amazing in your room,” I said. “Where are you going to put it? Over your bed might be good.”

  Again, he didn’t respond. It wasn’t like him to be blue. I put my hand on his knee and squeezed it. He looked over. His eyes were filled with tears.

  “What is it?” I asked him, surprised.

  “It’s just that it’s all done now. I don’t have it to look forward to anymore.”

  “There’ll be other things,” I said. “Plenty of things.”

  “Maybe. It just feels funny right now.”

  He twisted toward the window so that he wouldn’t have to look at me. I didn’t push it; he was rarely moody. He ate a couple of peanuts.

  “Thanks for everything you did, Bee,” he said, turning to me after a while. “No one else would have understood.”

  “You’re my brother and I love you,” I said. “I’d do whatever I could for you.”

  “Still, though. You never ask for anything for yourself. Someday I’d like to do something for you.”

  “You do plenty for me, Tommy.”

  “I mean like an adventure. Like what we just had. You get kind of lost in the shuffle because everyone pays attention to me. Because of the CF.”

  “I think I had my own adventure,” I said. “Truly.”

  “You mean Little Brew?”

  Tommy wiggled his eyebrows. I shoved my shoulder into his.

  “Little Brew wouldn’t have given you that necklace if he didn’t like you,” Tommy said. “He’s not phony. Ty told me Little Brew never goes after a girl.”

  “Girls go after him, I bet.”

  Tommy laughed. “Probably if they’re not blind,” he said.

  “He’s golden.”

  “You’re golden, too, Bee. Will you guys e-mail?”

  “Absolutely. And I hope we see each other again.”

  “Just say you will and you will. I wanted to see a shark and I did. If you wish for something, it stands a chance of happening.”

  Later on Tommy sighed and said he didn’t really know why he loved sharks, but that it didn’t matter. You didn’t always have to explain why you loved something. Love was a thing that swam beneath you, kind of like a shark, and you wouldn’t want the world to be without it, but it could hurt, too. He said that late at night he often thinks of sharks swimming, their pectoral fins stabilizing them, their bodies perfect triangles as they soar through the water, and he sometimes finds he is looking from the shark’s perspective at the water in front of him. Sometimes he feels exactly like the sharks he loves, like a thing in constant movement, always hunting, always moving forward, but the sea around him is impenetrable. Everything is shadow and light and bright things that flash and move away. He said sometimes he thinks he likes sharks because his illness made other people leery, made them afraid that what he had could pass to them somehow, and when a shark patrolled a reef or passed near a seal colony the other creatures ran not only for their lives, but because a shark was the other side of their characters. So he was not afraid of sharks, he was a shark, and the CF marked him among other people. That was why Ty and Little Brew meant so much. That was why one day, filled all the way up, meant so much to him. In the California sun he had shed his sharkness, left it for a moment, and he had risen up, a surfer, a boy again, triumphant despite everything.

  That was how he said it, more or less. He said it in his Tommy way. I listened. I put my arm around him and we flew through the night, heading home to New Hampshire.

  When I was in eighth grade, I came across a book about a series of shark attacks off the New Jersey coastline not far from where I grew up, and I have been a lover of shark tales ever since. Once, sitting on a jetty near Point Pleasant, New Jersey, I saw a shark following a fishing boat into port, and I was mesmerized by the fin cleaving the water, the lazy swish of the animal as the shark fed on the entrails thrown aft by the mate. Although I am not entirely proud of it, I confess I have always been drawn to accounts of sharks attacking humans. I’m not sure why I thrill to those accounts, but I know I am not alone. Many of us respond to such stories. The popularity of movies such as Jaws and Open Water and the ever-increasing viewer ship of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week attest to our fascination with these beautiful—and occasionally deadly—creatures of the sea.

  But if we love sharks, or at least find them interesting and worthy of our observation, then it’s important to remind ourselves that humans are far deadlier to sharks than the reverse. I’ve heard it said that the likelihood of an individual’s dying by shark attack is roughly equivalent to the likelihood of death by a coconut falling on the head. While it’s true that our increased recreation in the sea—skin diving, distance swimming, surfing, and kayaking—puts us more consistently in the sharks’ path, sharks suffer much more from our predation than we do from theirs. Caught on long fishing lines—by some estimates more than six hundred every minute—killed for sport and to satisfy the demand for shark-fin soup, the world’s shark population has been heavily depleted. Though we marvel at pictures of great whites breaching off the coast of South Africa as they attack seals on the sea’s surface, we pay little attention to the daily decimation visited by humans on sharks. The story behind Shark Week, in other words, is far grimmer than we might like to admit.

  It’s my hope that Wish reminds us of our obligation to the animals around us, especially, in this instance, to sharks. Perhaps the love and admiration Tommy brings to his study of sharks will help us to see animals on their own terms. A shark goes about a shark’s business, and if that business sometimes includes a human victim, then that is regrettable but entirely understandable. Sharks are not monsters. They are our companions on this earth.

  As someone once said, a world without tigers is no world at all. I think the same can be said about sharks.

  I am indebted to Susan Casey’s fine account of her time spent near the Farallon Islands for some of the atmosphere and background of this novel. I recommend her book The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks to anyone interested in reading more about great whites. Some of Tommy’s shark facts—and his sightseeing trip to the Farallones—grew directly from my reading of Ms. Casey’s work.

  I am also grateful to my editor, Françoise Bui, for her excellent reading of this novel. Her comments and suggestions improved the manuscript from its original conception
. Thanks, also, to my friends and agents Christina Hogrebe and Andrea Cirillo, both of whom provided insight into the characters and plot. It is a genuine pleasure to work with them.

  Finally, to my wife, Wendy, who is always my first reader—thanks for everything.

  JOSEPH MONNINGER has published eleven novels and three nonfiction books for adults, as well as two award-winning novels for young adults: Hippie Chick, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book, and Baby, an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults. He lives in New Hampshire, where he is an English professor.