The Dead and the Missing

My curiosity ended, however, when an incoming roller challenged me as only the ocean can. I lay on my front and paddled.

This was the wave. My wave.

I found my focus point and scooped faster and faster, shoulders heaving against the water. My speed and the sea’s roll fell into sync. I popped up on my board and carved through the wall of water, nature’s hand embracing and guiding me toward the sand. I’m a shade under six feet, but this wave curled over me by another head. It should have been terrifying, but I allowed the ocean to propel me forward while all I had to do was not fall off; this illusion of control, this delusion that nature could not simply swat me from existence … was enough to bring me home.

As I hopped off my board in the foaming shallows, a smattering of applause sounded and a couple of the youthfully smooth girls trotted over. Late teens, or early twenties. Bikinis under hoodies. I picked up my board and returned their smiles. They ran straight past a kid peeling off a wetsuit with purple swooshes, his sculpted hairless torso drawing even my eye.

Sure, I was in as good shape as any of the younger guys, but at thirty-six I needed to remember I wasn’t some “Bodhi”-type figure from the original version of Point Break; I was the old dude who turned up on their beach one day, and just about earned his place.

The only person who noticed me was the mommy-type blonde in the padded jacket. Hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched. About my age, perhaps a tad older, but if she said she was thirty I wouldn’t argue.

She said, “Adam Park?” Plummy, upper-middle-class. Not quite aristocracy. Poking out of her coat was the corner of a brown envelope about an inch thick.

I stripped off my hood and the upper part of my wetsuit, perhaps hoping to compete with the young stud muffin and his admirers. They all jogged by without as much as a glance.

Philistines.

“No,” I said to the woman. “I’m not who you’re looking for.”