Your Heart Belongs to Me

“Ryan?”
    “Just enjoying the moment,” he lied, remaining prone on his board. “I’ll catch one in the next set.”
    “Since when are you a mallard?” she asked, by which she meant that he was floating around in the lineup like a duck, like one of those gutless wannabes who soaked all day in the swells just beyond the break point and called it surfing.
    “The last two in that set were bigger,” he said. “I have a hunch the next batch might be double overhead, worth waiting for.”
    Sam straddled her board and looked out to sea, scanning for the first swell of the new set.
    If Ryan read her correctly, she sensed that he was shining her on, and she wondered why.
    With his heart steady and his strength recovered, he stopped hugging the board, straddled it, getting ready.
    Waiting for the next wave train, he told himself that he had not experienced a physical seizure, but instead merely an anxiety attack. At self-deception, he was as skilled as anyone.
    He had no reason to be anxious. His life was sweet, buttered, and sliced for easy consumption.
    Focused on far water, Samantha said, “Winky.”
    “I see it.”
    The sea rose to the morning sun, dark jade and silver, a great shoulder of water shrugging up and rolling smoothly toward the break.
    Ryan smelled brine, smelled the iodine of bleeding seaweed, and tasted salt.
    “Epic,” Sam called out, sizing the swell.
    “Monster,” he agreed.
    Instead of rising into a control position, she left the wave to him, her butt on the board, her feet in the water, bait for sharks.
    A squadron of gulls streaked landward, shrieking as if to warn those on shore that a behemoth was coming to smash sand castles and swamp picnic hampers.
    As the moment of commitment neared, apprehension rose in Ryan, concern that the thrill of the ride might trigger another…episode.
    He paddled to catch the wave, got to his feet on the pivot point, arms reaching for balance, fingers spread, palms down, and he caught the break, a perfect peeler that didn’t section on him but instead poured pavement as slick as ice. The moving wave displaced air, and a cool wind rose up the curved wall, pressing against his flattened palms.
    Then he was in a tube, a glasshouse, behind the curtain of the breaking wave, shooting the curl, and his apprehension burst like a bubble and was no more.
    Using every trick to goose momentum, he emerged from the tube before it collapsed, into the sparkle of sun on water filigreed with foam. The day was so real, so right. He admonished himself, No fear, which was the only way to live.
     

     
    All morning, into the afternoon, the swells were monoliths. The offshore breeze strengthened, blowing liquid smoke off the lips of the waves.
    The beach blanket was not a place to tan. It was for rehab, for massaging the quivers out of overtaxed muscles, for draining sinuses flooded with seawater, for combing bits of kelp and crusted salt out of your hair, for psyching each other into the next session.
    Usually, Ryan would want to stay until late afternoon, when the offshore breeze died and the waves stopped hollowing out, when the yearning for eternity—which the ocean represented—became a yearning for burritos and tacos.
    By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep….
    As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: “Ryan?”
    “Hmmmm?”
    “Were you asleep?”
    He felt as though he were still asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.
    “You were asleep,” Samantha said.
    “Too much big surf. I’m quashed.”
    “You? When have you ever been quashed?”
    Sitting up on the blanket, he said, “Had to be a first time.”
    “You really want to pack out?”
    “I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch.”
    “There’s chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler.”
    “Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me.”
    They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in