Desperation Reef

Why not write about all this until now? After all, I learned how to do this in college. How to put words down. It’s much easier than riding a fifty-foot wave. Or raising two sons. It isn’t rocket science, to write a firsthand report of an event you were a part of.

But my husband’s death was too sudden and too unlikely for me — his twenty-one-year-old wife — to understand at that time.

I did not understand.

I understood his broken bones and fractured skull and the seawater in his lungs, and the leash caught on the rocks and still strapped to his ankle.

But I did not understand the why of it.

I’m forty-six, and that is what I am hoping to do now.

John Stonebreaker was my new, five-doors-down neighbor when I was twelve. His big family had just moved onto our street, Alta Laguna Boulevard, in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood. He was seventeen and the second oldest of the Stonebreaker kids.

We Byrnes were a longtime Laguna family. My grandparents owned a restaurant on Coast Highway that I eventually inherited, redesigned, renamed the Barrel, and still operate today. My dad became Laguna’s chief of police. He was a tough cop but a cuddly bear at home. He believed — still does — that a cop should serve and protect. An oath he took very seriously. He believed that Laguna’s citizens and her thousands of summer visitors were his responsibility. His flock. My mother — an Olympic swimmer in the Montreal summer games of 1976 — was a Laguna Beach High School girls’ PE teacher, and coach of the swim, water polo, and surf teams. She believed that an athlete should win. And a coach should make that happen. Trophies, medals, ribbons, scholarships. Win or stay home.

Don and Eve Byrne, née Braxton.

Mom was my inspiration and my belief.

Dad was my idol.

I was their only child.

John Stonebreaker at seventeen was thin, blond-haired, and blue eyed. A little dip-shouldered (the left) which made him seem casual and unconcerned with his appearance.

I first saw him on a hot July evening, wheeling a trash can from his house to the curb. He had just moved in. He seemed purposeful and focused, fitting that trash can flush with the curb, making a few small adjustments to get it right.

That night I asked Mom and Dad about the new family, trying to press them for information without spilling my curiosity about the boy.

Mom told me the Stonebreakers came up from San Clemente. They were renting here. The dad was a preacher who had just opened his own church in Laguna Niguel, in a storefront that used to be a donut shop. Mrs. Stonebreaker was going to be a counselor at the high school, so we’ll be working together, Mom had said.

“They have four kids and they all surf at the San Onofre Surf Club. Even the preacher. They’ve got some Irish in them, like us. Or so says Marilyn Stonebreaker. Nice woman. Pretty and sweet.”

The next day I saw John surfing Rockpile, north of Main Beach.

I was on the beach with my best friend, Belle Becket, pressing our boogie board leashes tight around our skinny, twelve-year-old ankles.

John rode the wave like he took out the trash, measured and confident, as if there was one perfect way to do it, and he knew that way.

This was back in 1990, when short-board, quick and nimble surfing had long taken over the Beach Boys days of nose-riding. But on one wave John went retro, sidled forward, and rode with his toes on the nose of his board. Not easy on a short, fast, fish-style wave rider.

I loved his grace, his nonchalance, his cool.

John Stonebreaker didn’t just look cool, he was cool — the body and form of it.

I’m going to be that someday, I told myself. I’m going to be him.

I still see that boy and that wave in my mind’s eye, as clearly as if it had happened just this morning.

We watched him awhile, and rode a few of those nasty Rockpile waves on our body boards. When we were done we headed straight to the Thalia Surf Shop, where I gave up my boogie board and a twenty-dollar down payment on a used twin-fin Infinity that the shop owner said was the right size and shape for Laguna. Eighty-five bucks.

Belle got a surfboard, too, a new Town & Country made in Hawaii that cost her dermatologist dad a small fortune.

We surfed all the next morning at Rockpile.

Rough stuff. Didn’t catch a wave. Stand-up surfing isn’t boogie boarding, not that we thought it would be.

Didn’t see John Stonebreaker until almost a week later, when I cruised past his house again on my skateboard and saw him in the garage, doing I knew not what under strong lights.

I hopped off, flipped my board into my hand, and walked back.

Squeezing in between the cars in the driveway — an old hippie van and a newer VW Westphalia — I stood just outside the entrance.

John was taller than he looked from shore the week before. He was dressed in red surf trunks with a baggy, white, long-sleeved T-shirt. He had a tool in both hands, bearing down on a white surfboard blank on sawhorses.

“Hey, I’m Jen Byrne. I saw you surf. I’d like to join your team.”

“There’s no team.”