Second Star

2

“Wendy!”

I’m lying on the beach, gazing out at the water, when I hear Dax and Fiona calling my name. I turn around and see them walking toward me, kicking up sand with every step.

“What took you so long?” Fiona says, out of breath. “I thought you were just going to get your phone.” She reaches for me, then pulls back suddenly. “Why are you soaking wet?”

“I’m fine,” I say, brushing some of the sand from my damp skin. “He saved me.”

“Who?” Dax says, wrapping his fingers around my upper arm and pulling me to a stand.

“The surfer who got me out of the water.”

“Who got you out of the water?” Fiona’s voice sounds desperate. “What were you doing in the water?”

I turn back to the ocean, even though the boy and his surfboard are long gone. “He left,” I say, shrugging.

Without even seeing it, I can sense Fiona shooting a look at Dax over my head.

“Don’t do that.” I shake my head, irritated. People have been giving me that same worried, nervous expression for months, to my face and behind my back. Teachers, when I turned my papers in, not just on time, but early. Police officers, when I dropped off missing persons fliers in their precincts. Did they think I didn’t notice it? That I didn’t know what it meant?

“It has nothing to do with John and Michael,” I say suddenly, surprised at how harsh my voice sounds. I turn to Dax. “You can let go of me now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I think we should take you home,” Dax says, the words coming slowly. “You need to get out of those wet clothes.”

“You know, just because you’re my best friend’s boyfriend doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”

Dax finally releases my arm.

“Wendy,” Fiona says gently, resting her dry hand on my wet skin.

I shake my head. “I can take myself home,” I say, shrugging off Fiona’s soft touch and turning to walk to the parking lot.

“What’s gotten into you?” Fiona asks.

I spin to face her. “Who are you to tell me that they aren’t out there?” I say, and my voice sounds rough, as though the sand has stuck to my tongue and caught in my throat.

“I didn’t mean…” Fiona pauses. She looks at Dax, not at me.

“Sure you did,” I say, and I wonder where the certainty in my voice is coming from when I add, “But they are out there. I know they are.”

The last time the police visited our house was three months ago.

“You better sit down,” the officers had said to my parents. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to sit down, too. But I wasn’t about to miss a word they said, so I stood by the kitchen counter listening as the officers spoke.

There had been a major swell somewhere up the coast this winter, they said. Surfers had come from all over the world, lured by the promise of record-breaking waves all along northern California, from Pebble Beach to Monterey to Santa Cruz. But conditions had been bad: it was raining, water temperatures were low. Three surfers went missing that day, the police said. Only one body had been found. Spectators recalled that the missing surfers had been young—no more than teenagers—and someone heard they were from Newport Beach.

One of the officers nodded to the other, who got up wordlessly from our kitchen table and walked out the front door. I was tempted to follow him, but I kept myself planted by the kitchen counter. He didn’t even bother closing the door behind him, and when he came back in, he was struggling under the weight of two surfboards. The remains of two surfboards.

“Do these look familiar to you?” he asked.

My mother’s only answer was to burst into tears; my father said nothing. The boards were destroyed; it was more like two-thirds of one board and less than half of another. On one, the foot straps were torn in half. The very things that were supposed to keep a surfer’s feet tethered to his board had betrayed him.

Since then, my parents have been acting as though they’re positive that Michael and John were the two nameless, drowned surfers. The police certainly believed it; the search had stopped, and I pictured my brothers’ files stamped with the words CASE CLOSED. Our family mourned as surely as if there had been bodies to lay inside caskets, coffins to lower into the ground.

But I was never so sure. I went online and searched images from the swell, pictures and videos of surfers in the rain, in the fog, tumbling between the crashing waves. I didn’t see my brothers anywhere.

I’m still soaked as I slide open the door of my house. My mother’s car will be sandy and mildewed in the morning. At least I don’t have to worry that my parents will have waited up for me. They go to bed earlier every night and sleep later every morning.

My dog bumps my hip with her nose when I open the door, sniffing at the salt water on my clothes. “Hey, Nana. Nothing to get worked up about,” I whisper. “Just a surfer in the water.” I stroke the soft spot between her ears. “And that’s as much of an explanation as you’ll get from me tonight.”

She follows me down the hall behind the dining room to the house’s bedrooms. The glass house has cool tile floors, and Nana licks up the water that drips from my dress.

In my bedroom, I leave my dress on the floor and climb into bed. Nana leaps up beside me. My room isn’t dark, not even when I turn out all the lights. It never really gets dark in a house with glass walls, propped on top of a hill, looking out over the city. The city lights keep the house bright; I’ve never slept in darkness. When we were little, my mother told my brothers and me that the lights from the city were our own night-lights, there to watch over us and keep us safe. The three of us believed in our mother’s night-lights the way that other kids believed in Santa Claus.

The tips of my hair are still wet. Maybe it’s the salt water drying on my skin, but I feel closer to my brothers tonight than I have since they left. I can almost hear the laughter coming from their bedroom across the hall, almost see the surfboards they’d leave propped by the front door every night, just waiting to take the waves in the morning.

I get up and walk to the window, looking down at the city lights I know by heart and the dark horizon of the ocean beyond. I picture the waves crashing on mile after mile of empty shoreline, bonfires burned down to ash, nothing but the moon and the stars left to light up the beach.

There are secret spots only surfers know. Places that the police can’t find and where my parents wouldn’t have looked. I heard John and Michael whispering once about a hidden cove.

Out loud, I say, “They can’t have gone far. They would never leave the ocean.”

I take a deep breath like I’m about to dive underwater and get back into bed. My heart is racing as though I’ve just discovered something. My eyelids grow heavy, but a thought works its way into the space between sleeping and waking: If I search hard enough, I will find them.

I expect to dream about John and Michael, but instead I dream about the boy I saw on the water, the boy riding the perfect wave under the stars. Asleep, I can still feel the waves lapping against my body. In the morning, my sheets are heavy with the scent of the sea.