At the stoplight, I crank through the flotsam and jetsam of messages. First, there's a must-return-by-2 call from the CEO of one of the med-tech companies I follow. Bad sign. Probably going to revise their numbers and put it on the wire after the markets close. I speed-dial him. We don't say anything like how's the wife or kids, how's the pregnancy going. He tells me they're revising the numbers and why -- higher costs and lower revenues than expected. Duh. What really went wrong, I say. Longer development time on the prototype. What's really wrong, I have to ask again, using different words. The truth comes out: the patients in the clinical trial keep dying. Whoa. I'm going to have to lower my recommendation on the stock. He knows that. He's just praying he's downgraded to a long-term hold, not a sell.
"Look, Mary Ellen, this is really a buying opportunity. We just need that extra month."
Another month or another product? I've got a lot of power here, and it's as uncomfortable as this pregnancy.
I come to message No. 7, Jack's, and it's so out of context, I have to replay. First, the laid-back surfer dude, "Hey, Mary Ellen, howzit? Radical swell from the southwest. Hurricane season in the islands. All the men are out." I wonder why he isn't with his fellow crazed surf-junkies. There's a little hitch after "swell" that recorded clearly, and I don't want to hear it. Swift as smell it brings back the fourth-grade play when he forgot his lines.
I quickly calculate how to fit Jack in without decimating my schedule. I can skip the conference call on an IPO, swing by Jack's flat on my way out of San Francisco and still make my confab with the venture capitalists -- the Silicon boys -- if the traffic cooperates. A faint but familiar twinge of annoyance jabs in the tendon where my cell phone presses, a vestige of the chain-jerking I used to feel when Jack was my stepson.
I cruise down the broad Sunset District avenue that runs to the Great Highway, the sand dunes and the surf. You have to accept certain things if you're going to live at Ocean Beach. Rats and rust lead the list. Also, thick gray air 70 percent of the time, a gunmetal dissolve around everything. There are the homeless. The vehicularly housed. Unclean sidewalks. I ticked these liabilities off on my fingers when Jack told me he was moving out of his dormitory to live in this flat with four other surfers who think responsibility in life means checking the storm-surf website.
I swerve to avoid collision with an L-Taraval streetcar. An abdominal contraction makes my heart clutch. Please be Braxton-Hicks. Six months is scary.
There is no street parking near Jack's house, so of course I have to park in the sand-blown beach lot, traipse back through the piss-scented access tunnel under the highway, rocking on the sand in my shoes. My Carlisle pantsuit makes me look like I'm cast in the wrong movie.
In a spill of milk on the kitchen table, there's a notice from the registrar at Jack's school. There's a lot of other crap scattered around it. Newspapers, a beat-up back issue of Surfing, cereal boxes, computer, a half-smoked number, a bowl of greenish nuts -- and they're not pistachios.
"You got any RAID?"
He laughs at me. "So inorganic."
Jack and I sit there at the table. He's got the mavsurfer website up, and he's filling in today's large square on a wall calendar. It's his log. Every day is filled in with a version of the same stylized wave. It's either higher or thicker, more tubular or closed out, choppy or glassy. Each hieroglyphic stroke means something specific. He works on it so that he doesn't have to look at me while he delivers the news. It's pretty hard to do, but Jack has managed to get kicked out of San Francisco State.
"What are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing."
"Okay. Let me try that again. What are you going to do?"
"Generally speaking?"
"Sure. Start there."
"Go surfing."
My derisive snort doesn't seem to bug him. He looks okay with it, indifferent, maybe. He's been a little cool toward me since I told him that Tom -- my husband after Wally the Manic -- and I were having the baby.
"Okay. And just how long do you think Wally will support you?"
A cockroach peeps out from under a newspaper. I squeal. Jack grabs a none-too-clean dishtowel and snaps the bug dead. I forget our problems for a moment.
"Nice stroke," I say. "You've got the technique down."
"Yeah." He expands his chest ludicrously. "I'm just gifted that way, you know? At least I use my gift for something more meaningful than torturing a little kid to practice the piano."
"You know Wally made me do it. And you used to snap me back more than I ever laid a lick on you."
I grab the towel and flick it lightly on the bare arm below his T-shirt. He jumps back, and, awkward as I am, I push to my feet and square off. He grabs somebody's shirt off a chair and twirls it up tight. He snaps at me. He comes close to welting my belly, but the stroke falls short by millimeters; I feel its breeze on my inner wrist, and that makes me mad. I strike back, but he grabs my towel midair. He tugs on it. I don't let go, and our faces come together. Sort of laughing, but still sort of mad.
"I'm sorry to be the one to inform you, Jack, but this place is gross."
He lets the tension out of the towel and sits down to the monitor again.
"It's been this radical swell, Mary Ellen. We're into the third day. Unprecedented. Look at this. Look at this."
He flips screens to a global map stitched with countless tiny arrows that show prevailing winds. The orientation, oceans facing first, emphasizes how much of the earth's surface is ocean.
"See that?" Jack says, pointing to a thick stretch of arrows from the South Pacific to the California coast. "That's the longest unbroken swell in the world, and it's rolling into Ocean Beach."
There's a manic sparkle in his eye, an adrenaline lilt in his voice that would do Wally proud if he could get past the idea that Jack is not destined for Ivy League success.
"How can you talk about that at a time like this?"
Jack doesn't bother to respond. How can he talk about anything else?
"Jack, you can't hide in the surfing. You don't get to do that. Nobody does. You have to have a job, Jack. And it gets harder as you get older. You know, it's really amazing you have to be told these things."
He's good at ignoring me when I scold. I feel the baby kick like a big butterfly flailing against a net.
Jack flips the screen, and I see tilted, crosshatched symbols decorating the earth like percussion notation. The ocean portion is color-graded to show WW3 Sig. Wave Height (ft). The spectrum runs from 1 to 75 -- violet to brick red, you're dead. I feel a beat through the patterns.
Click. The gibbous hump of the planet, black swirled with gray and white clouds.
"Ooh, I like this the best," I say.
Jack looks up at me, amused. "The satellite image? Why?"
"The picture looks so real. It makes me feel like a god."
"No call for humility, Mary Ellen."
"No, you know what I mean."
"I really don't. I feel like I'm in God's hands all the time. And I get the feeling he's going to drop me." He laughs this nerdy, nasal honk I don't think he ever lets anyone but me hear.
Click. Cape Mendocino, Point Arena, Bodega. He calls up buoy data for San Francisco, then Half Moon Bay. The names put me in the buoy-perspective: the chop higher than my bell on a neutral-gray Pacific day. I feel crusty and abraded in mineralized air, the ocean endless to me on my mooring. Beneath the chop, I rock up and down on a very long swell, like my baby when I breathe.
"You see how deep the ocean canyon is out here? You see the fetch of that wave? It's going to break very big when it rolls up on the reef" -- Jack looks at the waterproof watch I gave him -- "in about 90 minutes."
His precision makes me smile.
He gives me his fleecy, hooded sweatshirt to wear over my flimsy jacket and drives us to the break. What am I doing? The VC meeting is a big one for me personally. Do I want to waddle belly-first into that room of greedy egoists who happen to be very good at backing winners, or do I want to see Jack meet the wave of the year, decade, millennium? I'll call the guys -- feeling contractions, I'll say -- and they'll be flustered, embarrassed, understand why I have to cancel, and make rude jokes about pregnant women in the relief of my absence. They'll like me better for it. I reach for the phone, but it's not in my bag. It's on the kitchen table, probably with roaches licking it. My Silicon Valley buds will resent an unexplained no-show. But Jack's timing is so exact, I can see there's no pulling back.
There are a lot of scruffy onlookers hugging their boards on the sand dunes. The Santa Cruz guys always seem a little daunted by the lack of a channel at OB. There's a fat, unbroken line of current-shredded foam in front of a barrier of five or six lines of breakers before you get outside. It's very tough to paddle through on a small day, and these are monster waves. Jack's strong, but a bit skinny for a big-wave rider. Still, I see the confidence with which he navigates through the soup, using the currents to suck him out at angles to the shore. Like a small seal in his wet suit.
"Not likely to be great whites around this kind of turbulence," somebody near me on the shore says. Thanks for the reassurance, I don't say.
There are two other guys outside. Jack bobs with them for a while; then a set that looks four times bigger than the previous one starts building. One of the guys goes. I hear exclamations from the people on the shore.
"That's Wighty."
"Oh, man, he's dropping straight in the bowl."
His board bounces on the descent; the face of the wave is so big, it holds its own sea of chop.
Heart-stopping in its sheer mass, the wave rears up and closes out. Wighty goes under the lip and there's no place to come out.
"Man down," I hear above the sound-devouring roar. Long seconds later, Wighty's board spins up in an explosion of extreme pneumatic pressure. You can't get near him from shore. We see his head for a moment, then he's lost again.
"His leash is caught on the rocks."
"He's dead, man."
Both Jack and the other guy in the lineup see the board in the air and start paddling parallel to the shore to try to reach Wighty. The third wave of the set is coming. Jack goes for it. You never know until you go. A bumper sticker among this crowd.
What can he possibly do in the impact zone? The drowning man's head comes up again, then is lost in another big-wave hold-down. In the backwash, we see his body tossed.
"The leash came loose."
"He's not swimming."
"God, he's dead."
Jack is there, and the other surfer made it too, right behind him. They load the body on the other guy's board, which they have trouble doing inside the washing machine, and then paddle the hell out of there. I see another set building.
On the shore, somebody's called the lifeguard; they roll the body over in the wet sand. A guy runs down to the water to retrieve a washed-up piece of the broken board. They pump Wighty's back, and weird, thick foam -- like a head of beer but gray -- burbles out of his mouth and nose. He's not a young guy. He's a big, muscular man. Mid-30s, at least. I don't see dead people much, but his face has a blue pallor that looks definitive to me.
Jack is standing on the ocean side of the body, breathing heavily from his rescue effort. He looks so sad, I want to go hug him and tell him everything is great. But he'd be embarrassed by me, his oddball ex-stepmom, way outside his tribe. We might as well have this whole ocean between us.
The lifeguards are running up now; one of them falls to his knees and starts CPR. All the surfers stand close together, like little boys who want to put their arms around each other. The body coughs horribly and starts choking. Gallons of vomit start spewing out with so much force it jams his mouth open. Wighty takes a shuddering, desperate breath, and the lifeguard leans very close to him. After a while, they try to lift him onto a stretcher, but he waves them away and pushes to his knees. The people on the shore are amazed at his strength. He can't get any further, though, and his shaggy head falls back to the sand, as if in homage to whatever god has saved him.
I realize I've been feeling contractions for the last 15 minutes or so. I sit down heavily in the sand and start to breathe with purpose. I recall that I forgot the cell phone, and perhaps it is the panic that phonelessness triggers in me that makes Jack finally look my way. I can see him struggle against the urge to paddle out again. His wet suit creaks as he comes over to sit with me and my baby. Together we'll decide what to do next.
Theresa Donovan Brown, '76, is a writer living in Woodside. She is working on a novel that follows the adventures of this story's narrator.
