“How much?” she asks.

“Time and material. This is something I want to do. You were kind to me in that magazine article. Much kinder than the neighbors. I’d feel good about doing this. For you.”

“How much would time and material be?”

“Truthfully, my time is worth nothing, so two thousand dollars should cover it.”

“Two thousand.”

He nods and touches the floor again with a clean white athletic shoe. Looks up at her, eyes placid, forehead wrinkled with inquiry.

“No, thank you. Please get out now. Please.”

“Sure, I will. I was expecting you to say no. It says much more about you than a yes would.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Orchard.”

Orchard stands backlit through the rippling plastic, the cars on Coast Highway moving behind him.

“Wait,” she says. “Give me your phone number and your address.”

In case I change my mind?

Orchard pulls a phone from a front pocket, works the pad with a forefinger.

“Is the Barrel number still good?” he asks.

Another creepy rush as she realizes he’s got that number.

“For now.”

The arsonist patiently taps away. “Okay,” he says. “If you change your mind. Or maybe if you want to write about me again.”

He raises a hand, then picks his way across the Barrel lobby and fades through a flap in the plastic.

Jen sits on the back deck, sun on her face, smoke stench in her nostrils, chomping down on takeout from Adolfo’s.

It’s Brock on her phone.

“Mom, five-plus earthquake off Baja less than an hour ago. Marlon at Surfline says Todos Santos will be going off by tomorrow morning. So, kennel Mae. Casey, Mahina, and I will pick you up at home in an hour. We’ll trailer your ski, load the gear, and hit the road. Take us three hours, max.”

“Oh, boy.”

“This is us, Mom. Marlon says it might be crazy big. Or just crazy. Todos Santos hit sixty feet last year. You need a break, Mom. From the fire and the Barrel. And we all need a good warm-up for the Monsters. Need it badly.”

“I’ll be ready in an hour.”

24

Todos Santos is thirty feet of chaos, and one hundred percent on.

The quake-driven waves march in fast and crowded together, like they’re in a race, partially blotting out the sky as Jen looks up from the cabin of the charter boat Magdalena. The impact zone is a mist-shrouded valley and looks as if it’s boiling.

Israel, the captain, has pulled up well away from the spectacle. Tells them in broken English he’s not going to die in there.

To Jen the waves look rideable, just barely. They’re rapid shape-changers, sections forming and closing out, towering A-frames offering lefts and rights that form, then suddenly collapse. Some gruesome wipeouts. Jen spots Jamie Mitchell and Jojo Roper and Greg Long out in the lineup, all expected to ride the Monsters in a few short weeks.

Casey and Brock have driven the jet skis across the deceptively glassy quarter mile from shore, and they’re waiting a hundred feet from Magdalena, skis belching white smoke and whining with pent-up horsepower.

Jen and Mahina plop overboard one at a time with the brothers’ boards, the water a cold shock on Jen’s face and down her neck and chest as it cuts under her wetsuit. She paddles hard through the chop to her idling ski, trades places with Casey, who has a smile on his face as he sits on his board and fastens the leash to one ankle. Her heart pounds like a dryer with a bowling ball in it.

“Gonna do this, Mom, gonna do this,” he says. “Thirty feet of God’s love, marching in to hold us!”

“The rights are better, Case,” she says, noting that the right-breaking waves are clean, but the lefts are sloppy. “Never seen waves this fast!”

She steers the jet ski in a wide semicircle, checking back to make sure Casey has the tow rope and his balance on the eight-four gun before she accelerates and pulls him into the lineup.

Waits now, bobbing on the heavy jet ski. High-fives Roper, who high-fives back. The BetUS Sportsbook has good odds and lines on him for the Monsters, she knows. Just behind Brock, who’s just behind Casey, are the big, big boys—Hawaiian and Australian—and that truly miraculous Tom Tyler out of Santa Cruz.

Anybody’s game, she thinks.

Will come down to wave choice, and luck.

Now Mahina cuts out front of a towering peak, towing Brock behind.

Jen watches as Mahina speeds along the forming shoulder and Brock swings high into the wave, well in front of the massive crest. Where he drops the handle, and Mahina, after looking behind at him, speeds up and over thirty feet of still-forming wave.

Brock drops into the deep blue wave as if his board were a gallows trapdoor.

The crest is thick and shifty, rudely cleaving a left and a right, but the right is where he is and Brock rockets across the face of it. Then a blast of speed into a carving bottom turn as he banks and lets the face have him, brakes against it with that reckless cool of his, letting the maw have him as if he’s daring it to. Comes out of it leaning back a little, like he’s bored. Rides the elegant shoulder in sweeping, beautifully composed turns.

John all the way, Jen thinks—John in his last couple of years, when his instinct guided his body and his control submitted to grace.

Brock kicks out, and Mahina glides in.

And, minutes later, when Jen tows Casey into a similar, speeding, near forty-foot wall of water, she watches her firstborn son drop powerfully down that rising face, his legs like shivering pistons, crouched, arms out and flexed, and his bull’s neck clenched, and his big-jawed, heavy-browed face locked in an expression of undefeatable concentration.

John again, Jen thinks. In his early big-wave days, when surfing was survival. A battle of will over fear, of body over mind.

Casey bullies his way along, powers into the barrel and out like a man fired from a cannon.

Rides the smooth shoulder with his arms up in praise—Jen knows, always Casey and his God—then kicks out in a fists-raised victory leap, cartwheeling over the roaring wave.

Jen delivers him into another.

Mahina and Brock again.

Casey.