Second Star (15 page)

“The wave won’t break again until winter, if it breaks again at all this year,” he says. “None of these big waves will. That much I can tell you for sure. I don’t know when you’ll get another chance like this.”

Silence hangs between us while I consider his words. “Why are you here?” I ask finally.

Jas blinks; when his eyes are closed, the room seems to grow darker. “I told you. Because I think I can help you.”

“Yeah, but why do you care about helping me?”

Jas hesitates before answering. “I can tell you’re not going to give up until you find them,” he says finally.

“How can you tell? Just because you spent a few days with me when I was high as a kite doesn’t mean you know me.”

Jas nods. “When you talked about them you got that same look on your face that you got when you were deciding to take your next wave.”

I shake my head. “How do you know what I look like when I take a wave?”

He pauses, then looks almost sheepish when he answers. “I watched you. In the mornings. When you’d go out there and surf by yourself.”

“You watched me?”

“Just in case. You know, you were a beginner, and no one else was around. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

I should feel violated. The guy was
spying
on me every morning when I thought I was alone, every time I took my board out while Pete, Belle, and the rest of the boys slept. But I don’t; instead, I’m kind of glad he was there. At least he didn’t try to stop me, didn’t run down the beach and tell me I shouldn’t be surfing all alone, shouldn’t try for the bigger waves, ought to wait for the gentler ones. And I’m glad that he knows something about me that no one else knows: I had the courage to take wave after wave all by myself.

Suddenly, Jas says, “I’m sorry about your brothers, Wendy. When I sold them the dust … I mean, I never meant for them to go missing.”

“As opposed to all the kids you sell dust to who go right back home to their mothers?” I ask. Something about his coming here has emboldened me. I should be scared of him. But I’m not. And much to my surprise, he blushes under my gaze.

“Come with me,” he says finally. “Let me help your brothers. Let me help you.”

I open my mouth to ask about all the other dusters who need to be rescued, but he speaks before I can say another word.

“Please,” he whispers.

Nana didn’t so much as bark when I followed Jas out the window, climbed onto his back, and slid down the side of the glass house. I didn’t so much as blink when I climbed into the truck he was washing in his driveway the day I met him, the flatbed now filled with surfboards and a Jet Ski tied down with bungee cords.

I couldn’t say no to his invitation, not really. Staying home meant going to Montana, landlocked a million miles away from the ocean, from Kensington Beach, and maybe from my brothers, too. Yes, this guy is a drug dealer; who knows how much money he’s made off of selling dust to unsuspecting kids, getting them hooked, ruining lives—if not ending them? A lot, I think, judging from the quality of this truck, the number of boards in the flatbed behind us.

But he’s offered to help, and I’m not about to refuse.

Sitting as far from Jas as possible, my body pressed against the passenger-side door, I close my eyes and let a memory wash over me—a
memory
, I’m certain this time, not a dream: Pete’s chin resting in the small of my back as we paddle out to take a wave. The board sticky with wax beneath me as I pull myself up to stand. The ocean dropping out below us as the board slides into place beneath the crest of the wave. And the sensation that I’m flying, weightless and carefree, with no one on the planet except Pete and me, no one else who knows exactly what this feels like.

I open my eyes. Jas is driving fast and the ocean’s to our left and I can hear the waves, wide awake in the middle of the night.

Reality has never been so crystal clear.

24

We’ve driven about fifteen minutes when Jas starts talking. “So tell me about your brothers anyway.”

I shake my head, still determined to gather clues. “You saw them more recently than I did. You tell me about them.”

He ignores me. “You must really love them, to be searching so hard.”

“I’m their big sister,” I say. “It’s not a question of how much I love them. I just…”

“It’s just your job,” Jas finishes for me, and I nod.

“Do you have any siblings?” I ask. I try to imagine him with a family, but it’s impossible to see him any way but the way he is now, a drug-dealing surfer chasing his next wave.

“Not exactly,” he nonanswers. “Tell me about growing up with John and Michael.” When I’m silent, he adds, “It’s a long drive in the middle of the night, Wendy. Think of it as helping to keep me awake.”

Fine. I can just pretend that I’m talking to someone else.

“They always seemed twice my size, even though I was the older sister.” I pause, smiling. “John had a way of talking down to me that made me feel like I was the baby in the family.”

Jas laughs; his laugh is deep, and the car seems to vibrate with it.

“He was kind of a brat actually,” I continue, laughing just a little bit myself. “They both were. You should have seen them on the beach. They’d take on any wave they wanted, waves that the kids twice their size shied away from. Once, Michael actually picked a fight with some surfers—like, grown-up surfers—claiming that one of them had cut him off on his way into a wave. I thought he was going to punch the guy in the face, if only he could have reached his face.”

“What happened?”

I shrug. “I don’t really know. By the end of the day, he was surfing right alongside them, picking up pointers from them left and right. Maybe that had been his plan all along.”

“Sounds like they were pretty fearless.”

I shake my head. “No, actually. I mean, yeah, they were fearless on the beach. But at home—whole different story.”

“What were they scared of?”

I close my eyes, remembering. “They were scared of the dark. Once, we played hide-and-seek—the two of them against me—and they hid in a closet and got themselves locked inside. The closet is literally the only place in our house where it gets really pitch-dark.”

“How old were they?”

“Four? Five?” I’m surprised I don’t remember exactly. I do remember the sound of their voices yelling for me and the way I teased them through the door for giving up the game. I remember reaching for the doorknob to shout that I’d found them, and I remember that no matter how hard I turned the knob, the door just wouldn’t open. I remember crying for my parents to come and save them. Later, when my father finally rescued them, prying the door off its hinges, they blamed me for having gotten trapped in the first place.

That night was the first time my mother told us that the city lights were our own private night-lights. Even though they were mad at me, John and Michael slept in my room.

“What else?” Jas asks.

“Hmm?” I’m getting sleepy. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be able to sleep—not beside this stranger, not with the adrenaline that began coursing through my veins the minute he stepped foot inside my room. But my voice feels cottony in my mouth; I shift in my seat, leaning my cheek against the leather of my headrest.

“What else were they scared of?” Jas prompts.

“The usual stuff. Earthquakes. Fire. I made fun of them for it once; they were eleven. How could they be so fearless on the water and so scared on land?”

“Sounds like the things that scared them didn’t exist on the water.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. My eyelids feel like they weigh a thousand pounds.

“You don’t have to worry about earthquakes and fire on the water.”

“What about the dark? It gets dark out there.”

“Yeah, but they always surfed when the sun was shining, didn’t they?”

I nod, remembering something Pete said about feeling more at home on the water than on dry land. “I guess.”

“How old were they when they started surfing?”

“Nine.”

“Lucky.”

“How old were you?”

Jas doesn’t answer, so I try another question. “How did you learn? My parents got the boys lessons, but they blew them off pretty fast.”

Jas takes his eyes off the road to look at me. “Why do you want to know so much about me?”

“Why not? Like you said, it’s a long drive in the middle of the night. You have to keep
me
awake, too.”

Jas laughs. “Just haven’t really thought about my past in a long time. Sometimes I think I can’t really remember my life before I started surfing.”

I nod; I bet John and Michael would say the same thing. My god, they hated the lessons my parents bought them. Hated learning technique on the dry sand when they ached to dive into the ocean. Still, they couldn’t deny that they learned a lot that came in handy later. The lessons were expensive; maybe Jas’s family wouldn’t have been able to afford them. Maybe that’s why he began dealing. Maybe that’s when he moved to Kensington, when he met Pete, when the war between them began. Maybe after maybe fills my head, and all these questions I’m too tired to ask. My eyelids grow so heavy that it’s impossible to keep them open. I try for a while, blinking one eye open and then the next, but eventually, sleep wins out.

I wake up in an empty car. I’m in a parking lot. I unclick my seat belt and turn around and see a flashing sign that says
VACANCY.
A motel. I pull my phone from my purse. It’s 4:14 a.m. We’ve been driving for three hours. There’s no way we could have gotten to Witch Tree in only three hours.

I look up from my phone; Jas is walking from the motel lobby toward the car. When he sees me looking at him, he smiles.

“Morning,” he says, opening my door for me. “Come on.”

“Where?” I want to say
I’m not going anywhere with you
, but why would he believe that, seeing as I’ve already come this far with him?

“I got us a room. You fell asleep a couple hours ago, and I can only keep myself awake for so long.”

“Aren’t you used to pulling the occasional all-nighter?” I ask, thinking of the nights he stayed awake with me as I hop down from the truck.

Jas lifts my duffel bag from the back and slings it over his shoulder as easily as if it’s filled with air. He doesn’t answer me, just begins walking toward the motel. It’s only two stories high, and Jas walks along the first floor, past darkened windows. I wonder if the lights are off because the people inside are sleeping or because the rooms are empty. Ours is almost the only car in the parking lot, and I’m pretty sure we’re in the middle of nowhere, though it’s hard to tell at this hour.

I follow Jas up the stairs to the second floor, breathing deeply. Wherever we are, we’re close to the ocean. I can smell the seaweed, feel the salt air on my skin. The outdoor hallway is barely lit, but I still can see the sand all over the floor. And I hear the sound of the ocean, the waves barreling against the shore, just a stone’s throw away.

“Where are we?” I say to Jas’s back.

He answers without turning around: “Halfway to Witch Tree.”

“Witch Tree,” I mutter. “Who would name a wave Witch Tree?”

“There’s a dead cypress tree at Pescadero Point,” Jas says, still not facing me. “You can see it from the water. A witch tree.”

“Well, who would want to surf underneath a witch’s tree?”

Now Jas does stop and turn around. “You want to surf where the waves are, Wendy. It’s as simple as that.” He looks so serious that it makes me blush. I have to will myself not to break eye contact with him. “You’d like Maverick’s better. A wave near Half Moon Bay.”

“Why?”

“Legend has it Maverick’s was named after a dog.”

I smile despite myself. “Really?”

“Yup. In the sixties, some guys were surfing there, and one of them brought his dog, who was named Maverick. Apparently, the dog was used to swimming out with the guys, so even though they left him onshore, he kept trying to catch them. But the conditions were too rough for him, so finally his owner had to tie him up back onshore. They called it Maverick’s, and the name stuck.”

Jas’s deep voice takes on a sweet timbre when he talks about the dog swimming after his owner and I smile, trying to imagine what Nana would do if she saw me swimming into the sea, facing down forty-, fifty-, sixty-foot waves. Of course she’d come after me. She’d want to be beside me, whatever the adventure. I wish she could be with me now. Suddenly, I’m terribly homesick.

Jas resumes walking.

“What kind of dog was Maverick?” I ask suddenly.

“A white German shepherd,” he answers.

“How do you know?”

Jas shrugs, the muscles in his back visible even through his T-shirt. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that story,” he says, sounding wistful.

He stops in front of a door marked
30
. As he fits the rusted key into the lock, my heart begins to pound. Am I really going to follow this stranger—no, worse than a stranger, because I know the things he’s done—into a dark motel room in the middle of nowhere? Even if he did show up and offer to help me find my brothers? Even if he did drive all this way in the middle of the night while I slept at his side?

He surprises me by turning to me before he opens the door. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I got us a room with two beds.”

I nod. I begin to say thank you, but then change my mind; he hasn’t earned my thanks. Not yet.

25

I don’t expect to sleep soundly with Jas in the room, but I do. For the first night since I got back from Kensington, I don’t wake up in sheets soaked with dream-sweat. Instead, I wake up gently when the sunlight pours in through the windows. I glance at my phone; I slept with it under my pillow, just in case. I’m not sure exactly what I thought might happen. It’s after ten a.m. I roll over, expecting Jas to be snoozing in the bed across the room, but his bed is empty, his sheets barely wrinkled, almost as if he never went to sleep at all.

My parents will be awake by now. They will have discovered that I’m gone. There are five missed calls on my phone. They’ve probably called Fiona. Maybe they’ve called the police. Maybe they’re blaming themselves. Maybe they’re too frantic to do anything but pace the house, wondering where I’ve disappeared to now. I can’t call the house; they’d ask too many questions if they heard my voice on the other end of the line.