Wish (3 page)

“What other kids?” Tommy asked.

“Oh, another group of shark lovers. You’ll see.”

I knew right then that it wasn’t going to be what Tommy wanted it to be. And I knew he knew. As I watched him walking, his shark hat bobbing above his blue backpack, I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me and smiled. I felt close to crying again, and I wanted to tell everyone to stop, just stop, that we couldn’t mess up this kid’s one dream by turning it into an ugly Disney outing.
That wasn’t what Tommy wanted. But Tommy would never say anything. He had endured too much in his life, expected too little, and he would go along with whatever happened.

I looked at my mother. She glanced at me and smiled. She had reapplied her lipstick as we landed, and she glowed from the sense of travel and adventure, and from having an expense account for a four-day stay in California. The last thing in the world she wanted was anyone rocking the boat and she deliberately looked away from me, stepping up a little to be beside Mr. Cotter, her swirling skirt floating on the warm California air. As far as she was concerned, we were on vacation, and we were a family who hadn’t been on a vacation ever, not once, and probably wouldn’t be again for years to come.

Mr. Cotter led us outside to an enormous black Cadillac parked in the Arrivals section. The car looked to be about twenty years old, but in mint condition. We threw our bags in the humongous trunk. Mom sat up front, mildly flirting even with a geezer like Mr. Cotter, and I sat in back with Tommy. Mom said she had been in California years ago, but only to San Diego, south of here, and blah blah blah.

I looked at Tommy. He seemed exhausted, worn out
from the flight, but he leaned forward expectantly, as if he wanted to see every last thing around him. Mr. Cotter explained that we had a room on Fisherman’s Wharf, and then asked if Tommy knew anything about Joe DiMaggio. Joe D, as Mr. Cotter called him, had been a native San Franciscan and had played for the Seals, a minor-league team, before moving on to the Yankees. Mr. Cotter might have been talking about Santa Claus for all the reality it had for Tommy, but Tommy nodded and said it was interesting.

Then we had that quiet that sometimes comes over a carload of people. I’ve experienced it before. Everyone is tired, and no one has anything new to say, and so for a few minutes you simply ride along, your head leaning against the window. I had no idea where we were, or where we were going, but Mr. Cotter drove calmly and I felt peaceful and empty and good. I reached over and held Tommy’s hand.

When we got to the hotel—the Hyatt on Fisherman’s Wharf—my mother casually asked where Oakland was in relation to the hotel. My body was half in the car and half out, and it took me about a second to know the score. Obviously, Businessman Bob had been from Oakland. She tried to phrase it casually, as if she happened to be a
geography bug and simply wanted to get her bearings, and Mr. Cotter fell for it. Old men love to talk about directions, and I almost laughed because he gave her more than she bargained for. Meanwhile, I grabbed our bags and stacked them by the door, where a bellhop began putting them on a luggage trolley. I didn’t know if we were supposed to have that kind of service, if the Blue Moon agreement covered tips and things, but I didn’t stop the guy. By the time Mr. Cotter finished explaining the directions to Oakland, the bellhop had us ready to go into the hotel.

“Mom,” I said, to peel her away, “I think Tommy’s tired.”

She nodded. She was tired, too. We all were.

Mr. Cotter took the cue. He told us he would pick us up at five the next morning. He handed Mom an envelope to “cover incidentals.” Then he patted Tommy on the shoulder and went back around the front of the Cadillac. He waved one last time and climbed inside, and a second later his Cadillac floated away from the curb.

I helped Tommy write his Blue Moon Foundation application.

Mrs. Burns, his English teacher at Pemigewasset Junior High, helped him with the final draft. The grammar and form are better than Tommy could do by himself, but it sounds like Tommy anyway.

Some observations about Fisherman’s Wharf.

1.
It’s a tourist trap.

2.
If you’re in San Francisco, you kind of have to go. Everything in San Francisco points back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Probably because it isn’t hilly like the rest of the city and you can smell the ocean. Portland, Maine, has a wharf sort of like it, but it’s much smaller and not nearly such a big deal.

3.
It’s a wharf, which means boats dock there, and fishermen push carts around and people throw fish and shout. They do
it for the tourists, but they also do it for real, sort of. It’s kind of half and half.

4.
You could spend a billion dollars on clothes in the shops. Anything you’ve seen in fashion magazines is here—way more than in all of New Hampshire. It’s all supertrendy and people walk around with smoothies and crazy coffees and shop. That’s all anyone seems to do on Fisherman’s Wharf. Plus eat.

5.
I bet some nights it’s easy to get jammed into a crowd, with people pushing and trying to get by one another. But October seems calmer. You can’t really see the stars except way out at the horizon where the city lights don’t penetrate.

6.
About a million kids roam around, most of them skate-boarders. It’s like seeing the edge of an entire street culture rubbing up against the tourists.

7.
The brochures say you can eat excellent Chinese food, but we didn’t find any.

8.
It’s three thousand miles away from New Hampshire.

9.
It’s made of wood and people get splinters, but a lot of kids go barefoot anyway. Stupid.

10.
It reminds me of fairs we have in New Hampshire in the fall. It smells like french fries and fried dough, only they have different things here like deep-fried cheese curds.

11.
The sun sets in the ocean here and in the mountains in New Hampshire. We once went to Cadillac Mountain, Maine, which is supposed to be the first place the sun strikes land in the lower forty-eight states. It’s weird to think of the sun traveling all the way across the states and landing in the ocean
right here. I know the sun doesn’t really travel—I mean, we spin, and the sun moves, and all that—but the East Coast is the golf tee and this is the hole.

Mom bought us dinner at a crab stand. The brochure from the hotel claimed that Fisherman’s Wharf crab stands constituted the raison d’être—or “reason for being”—for the area. Originally people came for the crabs and the local flavor of the fishing fleet. Eventually the spot became a tourist destination. Now you can take boat rides and sail under the Golden Gate Bridge, or take a trip to Alcatraz, the famous prison. If you hold a dollar in the air, ten people will help you spend it.

We ate at the crab booth, sitting on stools. It was nice being outside on a fall night. Mom was in a good mood. We had money for once—she showed me the envelope Mr. Cotter had given her, which contained a thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills—and we actually behaved like a family, sort of. Tommy looked happy. He didn’t say anything about the other kids scheduled to be on the boat with him, or what it might mean for his chances to dive with a great white. He concentrated on the crabs and french fries and his orange soda, and I could almost see his lungs relaxing a little in the salt air.

I felt good, too. School seemed a million miles away. New Hampshire in October is beautiful, all the leaves turning and woodstoves beginning to push smoke up the
chimneys, but on Fisherman’s Wharf you could see every kind of person, and people looked happy to be on vacation, or killing time, and living felt easier somehow. I thought of my friends, Jill and Marcie and Maggie, but I’d left my cell phone at home on purpose so that I wouldn’t be tempted to text them. This trip was for Tommy and I had pledged not to divide my attention. I didn’t want to start obsessing about schoolwork, or the lame social scene at Woodsville High, or about any of the half dozen idiotic boys who hung around us. It didn’t matter right then. I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders and breathed, really breathed, for what felt like the first time in months. I knew I carried tension in my shoulders, so I straightened them and worked on my posture. I drank my soda down to the ice and made a cross-eyed face that often got Tommy laughing. It was supposed to mean that we had sucked in so far that our eyes bent inward. Or it could mean that we had sucked down something cold and we had an ice headache, something we called a caveman, because all you could do when you had one was make stupid grunting sounds, like
uhhh uhhh uhhh
. I looked over at Tommy and expected him to laugh, but instead he put his hand up for quiet and turned his head.

In that instant, Tommy heard them.

“Seals,” Tommy said.

He stood and started walking.

I had never seen him move more quickly, or with such determination. Mom had the same reaction as I did, because she called out to him, trying to get him to wait, but he didn’t pay any attention. Luckily Mom had already settled the bill, so I hustled after him with Mom trailing me. Tommy didn’t acknowledge our existence. I listened to the noise that had attracted him, an
arrrrr arrrr arrrrrr
that could only have been made by seals, but I’m not sure I would have noticed it without him. Tommy lifted his head and I realized that he usually walked hunched over, his lungs a stubborn weight in his chest, his legs under-developed, but suddenly he shucked out of that. He was
on point
, as my uncle Louis said about bird dogs when they struck a trail.

Tommy didn’t say
There
or
Look
or turn to see if we had followed when he arrived at the overlook of Pier 39. He simply stopped at the metal railing and let his eyes run all over the sight before him.

As soon as I saw the sea lions stretched out on the docks, their bodies like so many shrugs of meat, I remembered seeing the same scene on TV programs, and on postcards, but I hadn’t really considered that it existed in a place and time and that I could visit it. Sea lions lounged everywhere, their bodies scattered and limp, their fur glossy and brilliant. Two sea lions, maybe males, had squared off and
now barked furiously at each other, while a few seals answered tentatively from another dock. Cameras flashed all around the seals and people raised their hands and pointed at this one or that one. Tommy simply watched.

“Oh, the seals!” Mom said when we had collected at the railing overlooking the pier. “Tommy, don’t run off like that again.”

He nodded.

Mom dug in her purse for the digital camera she had borrowed from Aunt Carol. It took her a second to get the camera out, figure how to work it, and point it. When she felt comfortable with it, she told us to turn so that she could take our photograph. She wanted to have the seals in the background, and she thought if she got up on her toes she might be able to catch the right angle.

I turned.