THERE’S A REASON THE MAN AND WOMAN SITTING ON THE MANGY COUCH HOLD HANDS. THEY’VE ENDURED what you and I have not, and what they’ve endured has led them to question whether to live. You see it in their faces, in their bearing, in the shared glances before speaking, a weighted maturity that slumps their shoulders and draws into sharper contrast their youth: he with his shaggy reddish-brown hair and childlike freckles, she with her olive complexion and taut cheekbones and tattoos up and down her arms.
When a catastrophe happens, they say, you can choose to see it as random, as they each have. Randomness, though, is “a hard thing to come to terms with,” she says. A random life is a chaotic one, a meaningless one, ultimately a hopeless one.
On the other hand, to view catastrophe as fated, which they have each done as well, is no better. “You ask, ‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ ” the man says. A fated life is a guilt-stricken one, an angry one, ultimately a shameful one.
There’s a way out of this paradox. Finding the way out is the point of their story, they say. Finding the way out has given them a wisdom about life that haunts them. It is also a wisdom they would never trade. It explains why they’re sitting next to each other, on a ratty couch in a tiny rental a continent away from everything they know, and, yes, still holding hands.
HE REMEMBERS THE MOMENTS JUST BEFORE. WATER LAPPED AGAINST COLIN COOK’S LEGS AS HE STRADDLED his surfboard a hundred yards from the shore of Leftovers Beach, on Oahu. He remembers the sun’s warm glow in the east, a little after 10:00 a.m., and that he had been out some two hours already. He remembers being exhausted but happy—the dopamine high that rushes the system after a long workout. He looked the part of a seasoned surfer that October morning in 2015. Broad shoulders, lithe build, his V-shape frame snug in board shorts and wet-suit top.
He’d moved here for moments like this. Drifted farther west from his childhood home in Rhode Island for the waves and natural charm of the islands, all the schools of fish and Hawaiian sea turtles he saw beneath his board that morning. Out here, at age twenty-five, he could live life slowly. Back east everyone lived at the frenetic pace of achievement. Almost as an act of defiance, Colin had first come out to Oahu and rented a literal walk-in closet for a living space. The closet was close to a master bedroom in a two-story house owned by the guy Colin worked for, a manufacturing entrepreneur and surfer himself. The closet was four feet wide and fifteen feet long—with the cot Colin bought to sleep in, there was no room to maneuver.
EVEN AFTER the SHARK AT Tack, COLIN WASN’T SCARED of SHARKS. THIS ASTOUNDED SYDNEY—and INSPIRED HER.
But the closet was steps from a front door that opened onto the beach and the ocean.
He owned fifteen surfboards but just four shirts back in 2015. He acted like a pro surfer even though he wasn’t one. He told himself in those days he didn’t want to turn pro. He thought competitions would taint what he loved. Instead he glassed, the slow, careful process of fiberglassing and sealing surfboards. It was not at all the job his dad lived as a sports-apparel executive and not the life his sister had created as an Ivy League graduate. Many times a month, Colin tormented himself amid the beauty of Oahu with questions about why he didn’t have his father’s ambition or his sister’s intelligence. The questions made him feel smaller than his five-foot-ten-inch frame. The only answer that quieted his mind, he had found, lived in the barrel of the next wave.
I’m just gonna get a couple more in, he thought that morning in 2015. A couple more waves before paddling in to get ready for work.
Then.
The force felt like an eighteen-wheeler. He was instantly underwater and disoriented from the impact and then above water desperate for breath and then pulled under once more, even more violently.
Colin opened his eyes and saw the flash of a tiger shark, twice as long as he was, biting down on his left leg. He punched the shark on its nose. Once, twice, again and again and again. Its skin felt like sandpaper against his fist. The shark thrashed from the blows, butted Colin, then pulled away. Colin rose to the surface. Panicked, panting, he grabbed his surfboard to try to paddle to shore. He looked behind him to trace the shark but saw something else.
His left leg: no longer attached to his body. His left leg, just above the knee: gone. Blood reddened the blue waters.
Colin saw the shark’s fin close on him.
“Help!” he yelled. “Shark attack!”
Two surfers nearby looked toward him and began to swim frantically to shore.
I’m going to die out here, Colin thought.
Already the shark was on him. Its eyes, its nose, good Lord its teeth. Colin pushed and