Wish (19 page)

Later on Tommy sighed and said he didn’t really know why he loved sharks, but that it didn’t matter. You didn’t always have to explain why you loved something. Love was a thing that swam beneath you, kind of like a shark, and you wouldn’t want the world to be without it, but it could hurt, too. He said that late at night he often thinks of sharks swimming, their pectoral fins stabilizing them, their bodies perfect triangles as they soar through the water, and he sometimes finds he is looking from the shark’s perspective at the water in front of him. Sometimes he feels exactly like the sharks he loves, like a thing in constant movement, always hunting, always moving forward, but the sea around him is impenetrable. Everything is shadow and light and bright things that flash and move away. He said sometimes he thinks he likes sharks because his illness made other people leery, made them afraid that what he had could pass to them somehow, and when a shark patrolled a reef or passed near a seal colony the other creatures ran not only for their lives, but because a shark was the other side of their characters. So he was not afraid of sharks, he
was
a shark, and the CF marked him among other people. That was why Ty and
Little Brew meant so much. That was why one day, filled all the way up, meant so much to him. In the California sun he had shed his sharkness, left it for a moment, and he had risen up, a surfer, a boy again, triumphant despite everything.

That was how he said it, more or less. He said it in his Tommy way. I listened. I put my arm around him and we flew through the night, heading home to New Hampshire.

W
hen I was in eighth grade, I came across a book about a series of shark attacks off the New Jersey coastline not far from where I grew up, and I have been a lover of shark tales ever since. Once, sitting on a jetty near Point Pleasant, New Jersey, I saw a shark following a fishing boat into port, and I was mesmerized by the fin cleaving the water, the lazy swish of the animal as the shark fed on the entrails thrown aft by the mate. Although I am not entirely proud of it, I confess I have always been drawn to accounts of sharks attacking humans. I’m not sure why I thrill to those accounts, but I know I am not alone. Many
of us respond to such stories. The popularity of movies such as
Jaws
and
Open Water
and the ever-increasing viewer ship of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week attest to our fascination with these beautiful—and occasionally deadly—creatures of the sea.

But if we love sharks, or at least find them interesting and worthy of our observation, then it’s important to remind ourselves that humans are far deadlier to sharks than the reverse. I’ve heard it said that the likelihood of an individual’s dying by shark attack is roughly equivalent to the likelihood of death by a coconut falling on the head. While it’s true that our increased recreation in the sea—skin diving, distance swimming, surfing, and kayaking—puts us more consistently in the sharks’ path, sharks suffer much more from our predation than we do from theirs. Caught on long fishing lines—by some estimates more than six hundred every minute—killed for sport and to satisfy the demand for shark-fin soup, the world’s shark population has been heavily depleted. Though we marvel at pictures of great whites breaching off the coast of South Africa as they attack seals on the sea’s surface, we pay little attention to the daily decimation visited by humans on sharks. The story behind Shark Week, in other words, is far grimmer than we might like to admit.

It’s my hope that
Wish
reminds us of our obligation to the animals around us, especially, in this instance, to sharks.
Perhaps the love and admiration Tommy brings to his study of sharks will help us to see animals on their own terms. A shark goes about a shark’s business, and if that business sometimes includes a human victim, then that is regrettable but entirely understandable. Sharks are not monsters. They are our companions on this earth.

As someone once said, a world without tigers is no world at all. I think the same can be said about sharks.

I
am indebted to Susan Casey’s fine account of her time spent near the Farallon Islands for some of the atmosphere and background of this novel. I recommend her book
The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks
to anyone interested in reading more about great whites. Some of Tommy’s shark facts—and his sightseeing trip to the Farallones—grew directly from my reading of Ms. Casey’s work.

I am also grateful to my editor, Françoise Bui, for her excellent reading of this novel. Her comments and suggestions improved the manuscript from its original conception. Thanks, also, to my friends and agents Christina Hogrebe and Andrea Cirillo, both of whom provided insight into the characters and plot. It is a genuine pleasure to work with them.

Finally, to my wife, Wendy, who is always my first reader—thanks for everything.

JOSEPH MONNINGER
has published eleven novels and three nonfiction books for adults, as well as two award-winning novels for young adults:
Hippie Chick
, a
Bulletin
Blue Ribbon Book, and
Baby
, an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults. He lives in New Hampshire, where he is an English professor.