Brock squints and glances left a split second, just enough time to see the face of burly Kasper Aamon.
“Brakes, babe! Hold on!”
Mahina tries to work her big body down into the seat.
Brock presses his foot down, hard and steady, but not too hard; the old van’s brakes were never terrific and the antilock system is weak.
The tires bite and the Econoline hunches down. Brock feels the rear end shimmy, meaning crazy swerves if he pushes any harder.
Both vehicles roar past as Mahina shoots them on her phone, the drivers screaming and laughing as they merge into the right lane.
He lightens the pressure then reapplies force and the van slows back into control. As Brock stays to the right of his lane, the oncoming cars honk and speed past.
Up ahead Brock sees the Red Suburban and the two-tone Chevy at a northbound pullout, awaiting him.
He hits the accelerator and barrels past them anyway, both he and Mahina flipping them off as horns and “Born in the USA” wail from the pickup. Brock hates it when idiots misunderstand this song.
Mahina rolls up her window, lifts the shotgun to her lap, and goes to work on her phone.
A half mile farther up the road, Brock watches in his sideview mirror as the Suburban and the Chevy bounce onto the highway and head back toward Ukiah.
7
The following day, alone in the ocean at first light, Jen glides into a glittering Brooks Street wave.
She’s standing up on her paddleboard, guiding herself across the glassy shoulder, wielding her paddle as a rudder. The daily stand-up paddleboard session is one of her training tools—a fun way to build the muscle mass, cardio strength, and endurance when the waves aren’t big. Of course, there are also daily weights to be lifted in her garage gym; a two-mile run and a mile ocean swim most afternoons; high-speed, bone-crunching, open-ocean sprints in the jet ski three times a week—the rougher the sea the better; and her daily breath-holding sessions in the high school pool, where, as a celebrated alumnus, Jen is welcome pretty much anytime she wants. At yesterday’s pool session, Jen held her breath for one minute and thirty-four seconds before pushing off hard from the deep-end bottom, breaking the surface with a full-body gasp, her eyes bursting with stars. That’s enough time to survive the legendary back-to-back hold-downs at Mavericks, Jen knows—so long as the waves that have sent you to the rocky bottom haven’t first crushed the air from your body or snapped your neck. It’s a lot different in a pool than in a furious ocean trying to kill you, John used to say, and he always focused hard on his breath training.
Thus, at forty-six years old Jen is not in the best shape of her life, but near it. Her running and swimming speeds aren’t quite what they were twenty-five years ago, and she’s not as limber, and her knees creak when she gets out of bed in the dark every morning to hit Brooks Street. But her jet ski skills and underwater breath control are better.
The biggest question is, how good is she at riding enormous, fast, lethal waves in fifty-degree water over jagged rocks?
Well, Jen knows she’s not quite as good as she was back then, in the thick of it with John.
But this coming December, less than two months from now, she’ll be ready to surf the Monsters of Mavericks, women’s division.
And to tow Casey. And Brock, if he wants her to. Though Brock’s wife, Mahina, wants that honor and, as his wife, Jen knows she deserves it. And she knows Mahina is good, but good enough? No room for error, she thinks, and all that.
A blunt fear eddies inside Jen as she considers towing either or both of her sons in the waves that killed their father. But they’ve trained hard and they’re ranked among the top twenty big-wave riders in the world.
This fear is part of the larger fear of riding those waves herself. After witnessing what Mavericks did to John, she has lived and relived and dreamed what they can do to you.
Just the idea of being on the water at Mavericks again terrifies her. More than the towing in and the riding of the waves. The wild soul of nature lives there, without conscience or remorse.
Her husband taught her how to face it.
And for John, she’s going to complete the journey she began with him.
Now, Jen’s thoughts boomerang back here to Brooks Street, and she drops into another nice right, a smooth five-footer with a steep, smooth shoulder to work with. She banks the big heavy SUP off the upper face, dragging her paddle along the ribs of the barrel as she heads for the bottom turn. Then straightens and rises up the face, her bowl of orange hair matching her paddleboard and wetsuit—orange and black, John’s colors for his wetsuits and big-wave guns—and then she’s inside this gin-clear barrel, and her colors quiver and fragment within it. This would be a beautiful sight for an onlooker but there is none at first light.
Just Jen Stonebreaker, here alone. Alone since John made his early earthly exit.
She had ridden her first big waves with John when she was eighteen and he was twenty-three. The waves inspired a primal fear in both of them, a fear that kept them respectful, alert and—until that day—alive.
Jen had towed John into a Mavericks monster on her jet ski for the first time two months after her eighteenth birthday.
Married him on the beach at Sleepy Hollow in Laguna six months later.
Partnered with him in big-wave contests all over the world: Jen towing John into the men’s heats, and John towing her into the women’s. Winning a little prize money. Sponsorships. Earning some respect. Even as middle-class haoles from small-wave, big-money Laguna Beach. Even from the Hawaiians on the big-wave tour.
Jen buried her husband up in Newport Beach when she was twenty-one.
Gave birth to his sons, Casey and Brock, nine months later.
Not a day goes by that Jen doesn’t think of him, usually not an hour.
Mostly, she thinks of how she failed him.
In the privacy of her Laguna Canyon home, and her office in the Barrel, she talks to John. Answers for him in a voice that even sounds a little like his.
John had meant almost everything to her. She gave herself to him, heart and body, and there was practically nothing that she wouldn’t do for him. Practically nothing she hadn’t done for him.
Loved him and listened to him; cooked his meals and did his laundry; handled the money and paid the bills; endured his hangovers and his surprising, petty violence. Saved his life one brooding evening at Todos Santos with a jet ski and a rescue sled.
Their dizzying, smoky hours of pleasure in the little cottage on Victory Walk.
Not an endless summer at all. A brief one, but crammed with life.
But since that day at Mavericks twenty-five years ago—excepting the careful, focused raising of her two sons—Jen Stonebreaker has felt few moments of joy. Her life since John’s death has been over two decades of dedication to motherhood and the Barrel. Two decades of thinking she might try to ride the big waves that terrify her.
