Chapter Fourteen

Ray only let me visit him once in the hospital, and it wasn’t easy. I was still hurting from the death of my grandfather. And now this.

“I bet there are some kind of waves wherever it is I’m going,” Ray said the one time I did see him. “May not be the Atlantic or Pacific, but I hope they’re blue and fast and full of light. Think of me as a cosmic surfer when I die.”

He was still making a joke out of it. And I was mad at him. It didn’t seem fair and it didn’t seem at all right. Ray had taught me a lot of good stuff and now he was leaving. I almost wished that he had never shown up. Never taught me what I needed to know about surfing. “I still don’t get it,” I said with some bitterness in my voice. “Why did you come here to Nova Scotia if you knew you were in such bad shape?”

He took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “I wanted the feeling of a fresh start. I wanted it to be like back at the beginning.” He paused and looked at the ceiling. “And I guess I wanted to meet a kid just like you. Someone young and uncertain but with a great future ahead of him.”

“What makes you think I have a great future?”

His manner changed, and he was back to the old Ray I knew. “Hey, dinghead, when the big kahuna tells you about your future, you listen up. The man don’t lie.”

I wanted to tell Ray I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to do with my life, but I kept my mouth shut. The room felt awfully hot.

“You gotta take care of Mickey D for me,” Ray said.

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. I was about to cry. Mentioning Mickey D made everything suddenly seem real. He really was going to die if he was giving me his dog.

Some of Ray’s old friends and girlfriends from California started showing up midweek. I met a few of them at the beach. They knew who I was because I had Mickey D with me. It was flat all week. Not a ripple in the ocean. It was as if the sea knew about Ray.

Ray died on a Saturday, one week after the contest. On Tuesday, a taxi arrived at the beach right after sunrise, and the driver, holding a golden urn, got out and looked nervous. Tara and I were already there in our wet suits. So were about twenty of Ray’s friends from California. A big Hawaiian-looking guy named Carlos took the urn with Ray’s ashes from the driver and carried it down to the water’s edge.

Then Carlos picked up his twelve-foot board, set Ray’s urn on it and began to paddle out to sea. We all followed him. The water was like glass. The gulls dipped and swooped above, and you could see the kelp waving back and forth in the clear water below.

We paddled about a mile out to sea, near Shut-In Island. I’d never been this far from shore on my board before, and I felt excited, spooked and sad, all at the same time. I could tell that Tara was a little scared, but she was trying not to show it. Carlos stopped paddling and we all formed a circle. Four seals popped up close to us and stared with those big sad eyes. And from high above, you could hear the beating wings of a pair of Canada geese flying over. Even higher up you could see the vapor trails of American jets on their way to Europe.

Carlos held up the urn, and each surfer in turn said something to Ray. Some said something funny, some said something serious. I knew that everyone said something that was true. When it was my turn, all I could say was “Thanks, Ray. Thanks for teaching me to surf.”

Then Carlos poured Ray’s ashes onto the surface of the sea and there was silence. After about ten minutes we all paddled back to shore.

By mid-afternoon, a funny thing happened. The sky became overcast and yet there was still not a breath of wind. Waves began rolling in. Sleek four- to six-foot waves came in sets of seven. There was a lull of nearly five minutes between each set.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Tara said. We were sitting on the beach, eating vegetarian sandwiches that one of the Californians had made for everyone.

“It’s a long time between sets,” I said. “Ray told me that means the waves are coming from really far away.”

Carlos was sitting nearby and he smiled. “Yeah, bro. Long way. Like from off the coast of Africa or something. Time to surf, my friend. Looks like Ray pulled some strings somewhere.”

And so we all got back into our wet suits and paddled out to the Reef. The waves were fast and smooth, and the glassy walls allowed us to carve up and down. I had never seen such graceful surfing before. Then Tara and I took off on a wave together. I took off closer to the peak but told her to stay on. We both arced high up onto the wall and tracked in perfect unison, and I felt like we had bonded in a way I thought was impossible.

The waves lasted for two hours and then, as mysteriously as they had begun, they stopped. It was as if someone had just thrown a switch.

“Someone forget to put money in the machine?” Carlos joked. But we all knew that it had something to do with Ray. Somehow.

By the time we paddled in, the city surfers started arriving. They’d all been to the beach earlier that day and seen that it was flat. Then someone phoned in the news of the freak swell. But now it was gone. I’m not sure who said it. I just know that it wasn’t me. I was petting Mickey D, scratching him behind the ears, when I heard the words: “Man, you guys should have been here an hour ago. You missed it.”