Out she blasts, an orange-and-black comet in a dark sky.
Cranks up and off the lip, down and across, speeds through a long section without Brock’s dillydallying shtick, then up the face, over and off.
Midair, Jen reaches out both arms and screams as hard as she can.
No words, no thoughts, just the wail of fear banished, of a soul in joy.
Casey bucks through the chop like a bull rider, and picks her up—his smile like the one he had as a four-year-old, looking at his very own first surfboard in the Castle Rock living room twenty years ago, Christmas day.
Back in the lineup, helmet and hood off, Jen chomps an Abba-Zaba, feeling the warm seawater slowly oozing from her ears.
Casey can’t shut up: “… you killed it, Mom! I saw the photog boat right out in front of you, so they got some awesome vids and shots. Off that lip, oh man, that was rad! This is, like, the best day of my life.”
She watches Phyllis Kaiawalu—Ted’s sister—shred a thirty-five-foot face with the grace of a figure skater, and make a clean exit.
Maya Abeliera rides a beautifully formed forty-foot face in a straight, hundred-yard sprint that brings her to the faltering crest that knocks her off her board. Maya dives like a seal and dolphin-kicks herself back into the wave, dropping a shoulder and bodysurfing the slowing giant. Her board trails along behind her, like part of her pod.
Jen watches her surface, where she whoops twice, then yells with the breeze: “Don’t try that at home!”
Jen’s second wave is a thick-necked peak. She barely makes it, rides the elevator down, manages the bottom turn, then goes rocket-woman and zooms up the uprising face as the lip breaks behind her. When she glances back and up, it seems to be snarling.
She works the section back down, sees her exit route as the wave seems to snag on the rocks, climbs fast as she can for the soft spot and launches high for the other side.
She lands with a splat on the heavy black water. It’s like wet asphalt, and she hears the crack of her helmet and the wrench of her neck. Gets tangled in the leash for a moment but struggles out and climbs back onto her board and paddles hard for Casey.
Who makes a perilous pickup look easy, Jen climbing onto the rescue sled, reeling up her board with the leash. She looks down into the hideous Cauldron again—why does it keep me coming back, she thinks—then she feels Thunder’s power as Casey pulls her away.
They join the lineup, from the relative safety of which Jen sees the next set coming in, a dark, horizon-blotting platoon of killers. It’s like they’re looking for her. The ten-minute klaxon warning blasts across the water.
“You don’t have to ride another one, Mom,” says Casey. “You’ll get the women’s wave of the day, for sure. That’s, like, two thousand clams and a cool trophy.”
“I want to win the whole thing, Case.”
Jen hardly recognizes her own voice. It’s not the one she’s been speaking in for all these years, the one driven by fear and hung on regret. Right now, with the almost warm sunlight on her face, she feels that she is a different being. She’s grown. Evolved. Time to move into the world again, she thinks.
Hasn’t felt that way in twenty-five years.
John, that sun feels good, doesn’t it?
“You know what Grandma Eve would say about winning,” says Casey.
“Yeah—it isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!”
“Mom, remember why we do this. Or the Breath of Life, as Brock calls Him.”
“All metaphor, Casey. I want to win. It’s just the way I am.”
“This set is big, Mom. Real big.”
Jen watches Odile Bertran, pitched off her board before she can even stand up. The barrel takes her down and the rescue skis scream into action.
“They’re huge and fast, Mom. I’m going to put you way high up, so you gotta be fast.”
Odile pops up on the edge of the Pit and climbs into her tow partner’s sled just as he guns it away, Odile dragged through the exploding whitewater.
Maya Abeliera holds the tow rope, looks down, and lets the charging wave go past her.
Holly Blair makes the wave and carves an impossible bottom turn, only to be crushed by the suddenly collapsing peak. The wave elevators her back up, high, then slams her down again, her board tombstoning on its leash.
Jet skis throw up wakes and exhaust.
Jen watches the photographers’ boat rollicking just outside the impact zone, and the two helicopters hovering close together, their blades whirling not twenty feet from a breaking fifty-foot face.
Holly pops up in the whitewater, trapped in its churning fury, whirling and flailing, board trailing, snapped in half. It looks to Jen like she’s slugging the water with her fists.
Then, as a voice squawks down, she strokes hard for the red life buoy dangled by the rescue chopper.
“Swim left, Holly! Swim to your left!”
Jen’s third and likely final wave of the contest is her biggest. It’s the cleanup, nothing behind it but a waveless, heaving ocean.
She nods at Casey, whose expression is uncharacteristically puzzled. Feels Thunder’s torque and strength.
Throws the rope and drops onto a galloping, fifty-foot thoroughbred that suddenly raises his great head behind her.
The breeze lifts a white plume but Jen can’t look up or back, only down, half-blinded by the spray, letting her feet obey her eyes, trusting her stung vision to take her where she needs to go.
Too vertical and she’ll unfasten.
