SEVENTY

I drove back to San Diego feeling numb and empty. All of things that I had vaguely hoped I might feel once Keene was gone were non-existent. And I kept thinking of Liz, somewhere, watching me and shaking her head, telling me I’d screwed up.

I knew I needed to bring the whole thing full circle, to find some sort of closure, no matter how forced or pointless.

I went straight to the airport and bought a ticket to San Francisco. Simington had about twelve hours left in his life, and I thought I needed to be there for one of them.

The fact that the sun was shining in San Francisco when I landed completed the whole reverse axis the planet seemed to be spinning on. No clouds, no fog, no haze. Just sunshine lying across the water in some sort of alternate universe.

I called San Quentin and managed to arrange a visit for mid-afternoon. I rented a car and, with some time to waste, drove to a place I’d always wanted to see.

Forty-five minutes later I was perched on a cliff watching waves the size of buildings rise out of the ocean. A group of six was out in the frigid water, along with two more guys on jet-skis toting huge cameras.

Maverick’s was arguably one of the most dangerous surf spots on the planet. It had gone undiscovered for a long time until a guy named Jeff Clark paddled out and realized he’d found a gold mine, albeit one laced with dynamite. The waves rose out of the harbor in monstrous heights and then broke onto a wall of rocks that were sharpened like razors and axes. If you managed to survive a fall onto the rocks, you were just as likely to get your board tangled in the jagged reef beneath the surface of the water. All the while, the massive waves kept breaking on your head like hammers.

Brutal.

But the waves looked like they were drawn by an artist, with faces like ski slopes. Hard to resist.

I didn’t have any plans to get in the water. I didn’t have the right equipment nor did I have the right mindset. You had to be totally dialed in to paddle out, and as pretty as the waves looked, I knew that my head was too much of a mess even to give it a shot. But sitting on the cliff, watching those who knew what they were doing, felt like a brief escape from the rest of my world.

There were maybe twenty of us watching. The rare sunny winter afternoon had brought out folks who knew there’d be a show. Any other time in my life, I would have called Carter on my cell and told him what I was watching. He’d been talking about Maverick’s for years. Knowing that I was sitting above the water would have killed him, and I would have enjoyed hearing him whine.

But even that didn’t sound fun.

Two boys, maybe sixteen, came up and sat down on the rocks next to me. Shorts and T-shirts with surf company logos. Uncombed hair and year-round tans. Probably what I had looked like at their age. They were pointing and grinning. Their excitement was tangible.

The nearest one glanced at me. “Any idea who’s out there?”

I shook my head. “Nah. Just got here.”

“We heard Mel was gonna be out,” the other one said, scanning the lineup.

Peter Mel was a local and one of the greatest big-wave surfers of his era. He had helped get Maverick’s onto the map. Among other surfers, he was a rock star.

“Really?” I said, looking to the water. “Didn’t know that.”

“We saw him out here two weeks ago,” the nearest one said, his face busting into an electric grin. “Man, he was just awesome.”

I smiled, and it felt awkward. “I’ll bet.”

“I don’t see him,” the other one said.

“Bummer,” his pal said, but he didn’t really seem that disappointed.

The waves smashed to the surface with a ferociousness I had never seen. It sounded like a train wreck every time one of them closed out, a mixture of chaos and beauty. We watched a surfer paddle into one that looked twenty-five feet high. The wave picked him up and launched him down the face. Against the huge wall of water, he looked like a flea on a dog’s back. He raced along the bottom of the wave, the water crashing behind him on the fall line. Right before the wave closed out over him, he shot up its face and jettisoned over the lip, saving himself the torture of being caught beneath the falling behemoth.

Several of the spectators on the cliff clapped. The boys high-fived.

A cell phone rang, and the kid nearest me reached for his pocket and extracted the ringing phone. “Hey.”

He listened for a few seconds, kind of rolled his eyes. “Yeah. No. Me and Denny are out at Maverick’s.”

Denny laughed on the other side of him.

“I know,” the kid was saying. “Yeah, but … I will. I swear.”

Then he held the phone out as far away as possible and made a face at it.

He pulled it back to his ear. “I’ll call you as soon as we leave, okay?”

He punched the phone off and slid it back into his pocket and glanced at me. “My girlfriend.”

“Ah.”

“She doesn’t surf,” he said with a sigh. “She doesn’t get it. Thinks we’re just wasting time out here.”

I thought about my own experiences. Liz hadn’t always surfed. It was just beginning to become something we shared. But she’d never acted like she didn’t understand.

A sudden pang of loneliness struck my gut. She and I weren’t ever going to be in the water together again.

“Sometimes it takes awhile,” I said.

“I’m not sure,” the kid said, a skeptical look on his face.

I watched one last wave pulverize the rider, crushing him beneath a falling wall of white water.

I stood and put my hand on the kid’s shoulder.

“Give her time,” I said. “Or she’ll be gone before you know it.”