Ethan let the dog out, then showered and dressed in fresh shorts and a T-shirt. He grabbed the all-too-familiar keys and surfer’s wallet from his dresser. As he started for the front door, a voice called from the next room, “Did you sleep on the dock again?”
Sawyer had married his childhood sweetheart and moved to Oregon. Four years ago he had been diagnosed with adult-onset type 1 diabetes. Ethan had not spoken with him in months. Now his best friend sounded so young Ethan could have wept.
“I did. Yeah.”
“Not sure that was a good idea. Ready for your big day?”
The question pushed Ethan faster out the door. He had no interest in staring any more mysteries in the face. “Absolutely not.”
Ethan’s car was a cast-off Jeep Wagoneer, with rusty springs and a wobbly ride and no gas mileage to speak of. The Jeep had been his brother’s since college. Earlier that summer, Adrian’s boss had ordered him to sell it, junk it, do whatever necessary so it never again stained the firm’s parking lot. Adrian had sold it to Ethan for the whopping sum of twenty-five cents.
Ethan drove the lonely dawn-streaked road on automatic pilot. He couldn’t listen to music because the radio had not worked in years. His two favorite boards were jammed between the seats. The smells assaulted him, ratty beach towels and melted surf wax and exhaust. Everything formed ingredients of a life he had assumed was lost and gone forever.
His destination was the Cocoa Beach pier, whose restaurant served a fisherman’s breakfast twenty-four hours a day. His stomach growled in anticipation. That was good for another empty grin. He had not eaten breakfast in six months. Longer.
Ethan pulled into the parking lot and braked hard. The lot was full for that time of day, and the reason shouted at him from three banners stretched above the pier’s main entrance. The top one read “Bash at the Beach.” Below that, the second banner read “Cocoa Beach O’Neill Pro-Am.” A third canvas standard had been lashed into place below the others. It had one word stamped in glittering letters: “FINALS!!”
Ethan’s stomach growled a second time. But he was no longer paying attention.
Bleachers rose on either side of the pier’s breakwater. Beside them loomed two walls of loudspeakers, ready to blare music and comments at a crowd that would eventually number over ten thousand.
An East Coast surf contest didn’t normally draw that sort of audience. This one was different. A hurricane had threatened to demolish the contest before it even got started, but at the last moment the storm had veered northeast, away from landfall.
The waves thrown up by the storm had arrived Saturday, just hours before the first heats. Legendary surf. Mountainous. The sort of waves that remained a marvel for decades.
Ethan saw the workers pausing now and then and staring out to sea. The surrounding structures blocked his own view. But he did not need to see the ocean to know what they were watching.
Pandemonium.
The sun rose over a crystal-blue sea and cloudless sky. There was not a breath of wind. The waves were huge. The biggest and most perfect conditions to hit the Florida coast in a generation. The local press was calling it fifteen feet, but at this size, such measurements were meaningless.
As Ethan rose slowly from his car, he heard the compressive crump of very big waves falling far out to sea. The ground beneath his feet shook slightly from the shorebreak’s constant roar. As he stood there, the first television van careened around the corner and skidded to a halt, and the crew spilled out with their equipment.
Remember, Sonya had begged him.
Ethan remembered every moment.
The adrenaline pumping through his veins, the spicy smell of the salt spray blown up by the massive surf, the place . . .
Ethan breathed the words aloud. “I’m back.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
Ethan grabbed two breakfast burritos and settled on the stand’s top tier, away from the growing crowds down below. The loudspeakers played some electropunk surf music that Ethan did not recognize.
The first time around, he and other local surfers had waited atop the judging platform for the quarterfinals to begin, using the elevated deck to watch the waves and find some hint of assurance in the company of buddies. This time, he took another bite and studied the group seated to his right. One of the pros dragged here by O’Neill was the South African Hennie Bacchus. Hennie had not announced it yet, but this was going to be his last year competing. He was twenty-nine, old for a pro, and had helped shape the current trends in surfing. His grace was as strong on the beach as in the water, and his smile and looks would eventually help him build a successful career in politics. Hennie was also a pastor and ran a surf ministry that within a decade would plant a counselor in every pro tournament around the world.
When the O’Neill guys drifted away, Ethan slipped over and introduced himself.
Hennie studied Ethan and asked, “You a local, mate?”
“Born and raised in Cocoa Beach,” Ethan said.
“You did all right out there yesterday. Have you ever made it to a big-wave spot?”
Ethan hesitated, unsure how to respond. The answer was, he had surfed his way around the globe four times. But that all remained in a future that had yet to become reality.
Hennie seemed to take his silence as fear. “Listen up, mate. No matter how good you are or what you think you know about your local spot, you need to adjust your surfing to fit the size. Because straight up, those monsters can kill you stone dead.”
Ethan studied the honeyed skin, the clear eyes, the genuine concern. “I’ve admired you ever since I read my first surfing magazine.” He offered Hennie his hand. “See you in the water.”
As the clock wound down to the start of the quarterfinals, Ethan filtered the day through two different lenses. He vividly recalled how the contest had gone down before. The previous day, he had eked by with four second places in a row. He was the surfer with the lowest overall point score who made it into the quarter round. That night, he retreated from his buddies and slept on the end of the Holiday Marina pier. The water and gentle breeze worked their magic, which was why he felt even semi-rested. Not that it had helped.
This particular morning, he had suffered a bad wipeout on his first wave and never recovered. It was to be his one brush with fame. In the years to come, when his buddies spoke of that day, it was mostly about watching him go over the falls on an eighteen-foot behemoth.
Had he returned on any other day, Ethan would have been consumed by the impossibility of this. But today was different, unique. There simply wasn’t room to implode. He had dwelled on this day his entire life. The contest and the loss had defined so much of what was to come.
The desires, the fears, the inability to handle the ocean’s force—Ethan had run from this and toward this for years. He had surfed seven of the biggest waves on earth. And repeatedly on the days when he had surfed his best, from Hawaii to Australia to Chile to Portugal, he’d ended with the same wish. If only he could have gone back and relived this contest, knowing what he did now.
This time around, Ethan gathered on the shore with the other quarterfinalists. When the horn sounded, he launched his board into the water, reveling in a twenty-year-old body honed by constant workouts and youth. Added to this was what he brought from the first go-round: years of surfing the world’s big breaks.