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  For:

  Two teenagers. May 6, 1996. Pulau Langkawi.

  British tourist, age 26. October 20, 1999. Ko Samui.

  Sean from Australia, age 25. August 9, 2002. Ko Pha Ngan.

  Mounya Dena from Switzerland, age 23. August 10, 2002. Ko Pha Ngan.

  Moa Bergman from Sweden, age 11. April 3, 2008. Ko Lanta.

  Carina Lofgren from Sweden, age 45. February 3, 2010. Langkawi.

  Max Moudir from France, age 5. August 23, 2014. Ko Pha Ngan.

  Chayanan Surin from Bangkok, age 31. July 31, 2015. Ko Pha Ngan.

  Saskia Thies from Germany, age 20. October 6, 2015. Ko Samui.

  And for anyone else whose death has not been recognized.

  The miracle is not to fly in the air, nor to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.

  —Chinese Proverb

  part I

  SUNRISE

  prologue

  THE OCEAN HAS ALWAYS HAD a hold on me, and over the years has left its mark.

  A chipped front tooth from when I was surfing at Tourmaline in San Diego and the board snapped back on the leash and struck me in the face. The cold water of the Pacific hit an exposed nerve, and the pain shot straight through to my skull. It felt as if I’d fractured my jaw, lost an entire tooth, or even two. But my college roommate, floating on his board next to me in the swell, just laughed at the size of the chip.

  A small white dent in my thumb from shucking raw oysters on Kangaroo Island. Taking a break from studying Australian sea lions and sitting with a friend, kicking our feet off the wharf at American River and out over the Southern Ocean. There were bottles of Coopers Red Sparkling Ale and a bucket of oysters between us. She made me laugh and the knife jumped from the chalky, rippled shell and straight into my opposite thumb joint.

  A pair of pink mottled splotches, one on each ankle, from when I was wakeboarding off Saint Kitts in the Caribbean Sea. The inflatable Zodiac boat had already circled me once, dropping the towrope, but I’d missed it. The driver, my boss, circled again, faster this time. He thought I had the rope, when instead it had wrapped around my legs. As he turned hard on the throttle and sped away, the rope went with him, taking the skin off my ankles before tightening around them and pulling me under. I couldn’t come up or scream. It was the kids on board who noticed. They pulled me from the water and we watched the wounds go from white to red as the blood began to pour. In the moist heat of the tropics, I was in and out of the ocean teaching scuba diving all day and it took weeks for the skin to start to heal. Seventeen years later, the scars look like tiny raised maps of forgotten islands.

  Those are the scars on the surface, the ones you can see, the ones I can touch. But as it is with the sea, it’s really about what lies beneath.

  one

  Haad Rin Nok, Ko Pha Ngan, THAILAND

  August 9, 2002

  THIS IS WHAT I REMEMBER about waiting at the temple—cold, bitter black coffee. Someone had pushed a tiny white plastic cup into my hands. A small dark pool at the bottom. The bitterness I expected, but the cold of the liquid surprised me. I can still taste it, thirteen years later.

  It must have been around two a.m., but the temple was full of locals. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why. Women were passing out the cups of coffee and snacks, or sitting on mats spread on the rough tile floor. Men stood on the periphery, a small group of them gathered around a red Toyota truck in which the body of my fiancé lay, wrapped in a white sheet.

  Two Israeli girls sat next to me on a low wall at the edge of the temple. They had ridden in the front of the truck with me on the drive from the clinic. These girls had been with me through the most intimate and terrible moments of my life. I didn’t even know their names.

  We were waiting for a key. We had been waiting a long time. At the clinic, they’d explained that Sean had to be kept in a box at the temple. They said it was the only place on the island to keep his body cold. But they hadn’t been able to locate the key to the box.

  “No problem,” someone would say every so often. “They will find the key soon. No problem.”

  As we sipped the cold dark coffee, I watched one of the men reach into the truck and peel back the white sheet Sean was wrapped in. He gestured to the other men, who gathered in closer. They pointed to the red welts encircling Sean’s calves. Their conversation grew louder and more animated.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. The Israeli girls followed my gaze. One of them, the one with light eyes, jumped up, crossing the short length to the truck in a few strides. She snatched the sheet from their hands and tucked it around Sean’s body.

  “Show some respect,” she said, motioning toward me with a thrust of her chin. “Leave him alone.” The men may not have understood English, but they understood. They backed away. Still, she continued to stand, blocking the opened tailgate with her arms crossed in front of her chest.

  The other girl, the thinner, darker one, turned to me. “We don’t have to wait here. They’ll put him in the box as soon as they find the key. We can leave. Do you want to go home?”

  “I want to stay with him. I don’t want to go back,” I said, avoiding the word “home.” Back in cabana 214, at the Seaview Haadrin, was the last place I wanted to be. Sean’s things spread all over the room, our sea view looking out onto the spot on the beach where he’d collapsed face first into the sand. The sheets on the double bed printed with colorful cartoon clowns, sheets still smelling of him, of our sex earlier that day.

  I didn’t realize at the time that the Israeli girls were probably tired of waiting and exhausted. But they stayed.

  The August nights in Thailand had been uncomfortably hot since Sean and I arrived in the country six days earlier. We’d spent many hours sweating on those clown-printed sheets. But as I waited at the temple, cold began to creep up from my bare feet on the coarse tile floor, seeping through my thin purple sundress as we sat on the abrasive stone wall. Sean had bought the sundress for me in Bangkok. We’d been pushing through throngs of intoxicated backpackers on Khao San Road when he saw it at a makeshift stall. Sean prided himself on his bargaining skills, but this time, he offended the vendor and we walked away empty-handed. Halfway through dinner, Sean decided the vendor’s price had been fair and he slunk back to buy the dress at full cost.

  I was naked underneath the dress. We’d spent the last two summer months traveling through China, where I’d often declared some days too hot for underwear. I’d tie my long hair up off my neck, and wear a simple sundress and sandals. Sean liked to joke that there was only a thin piece of material protecting my most intimate parts from all of China. But I never felt exposed. Until that night on Ko Pha Ngan.

  That night I wasn’t naked under the dress because of the heat. Hours earlier I’d been wearing board shorts and a tank top. Hours earlier Sean had been alive.

  We’d been holding hands, walking back to cabana 214 along Haad Rin Nok, or Sunrise Beach. The tall palm trees lining the edge of the shore were motionless. The sea was calm. Darkness was starting to fall, though it was still warm and sticky. It was like every other evening on Ko Pha Ngan. We were planning a quick shower, and then drinks and dinner. We knew we were spending too much money on food, but had decided not to worry about our finances in paradise.

  Outside our cabana, Sean grinned and flashed his dimple as he set his glasses down on the porch—an invitation to wrestle.
I hesitated. He was much bigger and much stronger. I had no hope of not being pinned, much less pinning. But I dropped my sunglasses and kicked off my flip-flops.

  I lost badly. Soft white sand stuck to my coconut-scented skin, still oily from a cheap massage on the beach that afternoon. I was not a good loser, and threw sand at him as he disappeared into our cabana.

  I headed straight for the ocean to rinse off, the water so warm I didn’t hesitate. I could hear boys drinking and laughing on the cliff high above me. Sean reappeared and made his way to the shore. Without his glasses, he couldn’t see where I was. I took off my wet tank and threw it at him. He grabbed it and waded over to me, laughing. “I had no idea where you were until you threw your top.” I hugged him and circled my legs around his narrow waist.

  “You didn’t have to throw sand, Miss.”

  I made excuses. “I was just playing . . . and I was losing.”

  “Yes, you were losing.”

  He knew me too well. He paused and I felt guilty for being so immature. “It’s only because it got in my eyes and I couldn’t see,” he said. I rubbed my nipples against the small dark patch of hair on his chest and apologized.

  In my head, I was revising our plan for the evening to include sex before showering, and then drinks and dinner. He held me in the warm, waist-deep water as I wrapped my legs tighter around him. We kissed and I could taste the seawater salt on his tongue. I felt something large and soft brush against the outside of my thigh. I flinched and gave a short yelp. Sean had always been afraid of sea creatures and quickly asked what it was. He’d been particularly nervous about sharks and since our arrival on the island had kept asking me, “Don’t most attacks happen in shallow water?”

  I was studying to be a marine biologist and knew how unlikely a shark attack was, especially in Thailand. I kept assuring him that he was more likely to be struck by lightning.

  “I just felt something,” I began, but hadn’t finished the sentence when Sean flinched and dropped me. I was thinking that he was going to hear about this later, dropping me into whatever had frightened him in the water. But he was already making his way as fast as he could to the beach, running and pulling through the darkening turquoise sea with his hands. His movements were urgent and awkward, his elbows held high, his fingers splayed. I followed him to the water’s edge. He sat down on the wet sand.

  “Miss, it’s all over my legs.” I bent down in the fading light and could barely make out a faint red welt rising on his ankle.

  “It’s probably a stingray.”

  Whatever bumped me in the water had felt substantial and solid. Other than the small welt, I couldn’t see any marks on his legs. After the ray brushed my thigh, Sean must have inadvertently stepped on it. I’d been with people stung by stingrays before and seen how excruciating it could be. So I wasn’t surprised when Sean said, “Miss, my head feels heavy. I’m having trouble breathing. Go get help.” He was quiet, calm, and coherent.

  “Come with me.” I’d never heard of venomous marine life in Thailand. And he wasn’t sensitive to bees, so an allergic reaction seemed unlikely. I thought he was being squeamish. When we’d gone fishing the year before at Wilsons Prom on the southern tip of Australia, I had to be the one to bait the hooks with sandworms and then pull off the wriggling silver bream we caught. He’d even been scared of the tiny blue soldier crabs there.

  “Come with me,” I said again as I looked down at him sitting at the water’s edge. His dark hair wet, his narrow chest leaned back, and his long white legs now covered with sand.

  “I can’t.”

  two

  San Diego to Haad Rin

  1982–2002

  I DECIDED I WANTED TO be a marine biologist when I was eight years old. It was July of 1982, and the first time I’d traveled alone to San Diego to stay with my grandparents for the summer. Coming from my small, inland, Northern California hometown, I’d felt reckless and daring on the plane by myself. My little brother would never have been brave enough. We banked high above the clouds, the ocean a green expanse broken only by tiny whitecaps. I pressed my nose up against the window, the reflection of my own green eyes lost in all that water, and abandoned my previous aspiration of becoming a tightrope walker for something that felt much larger.

  Grandpa Bob was a physical oceanographer at the Scripps Research Institute, and he taught me about spring tides and how to recognize rip currents. My grandma Joy swam laps beyond the breakers, before bodysurfing the waves back to shore. Each summer, we’d spend the weeks together exploring tide pools, shuffling our feet along the sand to avoid stingrays, and watching migrating gray whales through Grandpa Bob’s telescope.

  During World War II, my grandpa had drawn waterproof maps of ocean currents in the hope that pilots shot down over the Pacific could use these currents to reach Allied territories. I remember pushing myself up onto my knees in a chair in order to reach my grandpa’s table. My finger was my plane, suspended in the air above the map, before plummeting from the sky in a fiery crash . . . here. And then I would trace my path along the swirling blue lines in the ocean to see where I would end up. Would I be blown into a spiraling eddy in the middle of the sea, or would I be swept onto the beach of a friendly nation? It was hard for me to guess which countries had been on our side. The landmasses were just featureless orange blobs. The critical details were all in the ocean.

  For ten summers, I made the trip to San Diego on my own. Once I finished high school, I returned again to study biology at the University of California. Every Sunday, my grandparents met me for pecan-banana waffles at Harry’s Coffee Shop in La Jolla. I learned to surf and to scuba dive, and volunteered at the aquarium at Scripps, guiding elementary school students’ chubby fingers as they handled leathery sea stars and spiny purple urchins.

  I took my junior year abroad, studying marine sciences in Sydney, and spent a blissful two weeks diving and counting clown fish in the coral reefs off Heron Island. As a senior, I conducted research on learning behavior in the giant Pacific octopus, and on courtship and mating in fiddler crabs. I spent hours watching the thumb-sized male crabs wave their whitish overgrown claw, hoping to entice females down into their sandy burrow. But the tiny females were picky, traveling great distances (up to fifty feet!) before finally selecting a mate.

  After graduation, I wanted to continue to explore the far-off oceans and landmasses I’d first seen on my grandpa’s maps. While my friends settled down in California, I taught scuba in Panama and Ireland, and marine ecology to teenagers in the Bahamas and Ecuador. I worked on board ships as a naturalist in the Galápagos and the Caribbean. In between contracts, I’d use my earnings to travel on a shoestring: learning Spanish in Costa Rica, walking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru, eating lemon ants in the Amazon, hiking among proboscis monkeys in Borneo, snowboarding in Chamonix. But I never stayed far from the coast for long. The sea kept pulling me back. I had no way of knowing what it would one day take from me.

  • • •

  “He’s hilarious. And super fun. And good-looking. When I first met him I thought to myself, ‘Marty’s got cute friends.’ ”

  It was my first night at the basic Albergue Palau hostel in Barcelona, and it was beginning to feel as if I was being set up. I’d heard Luisa on the phone earlier telling someone, “There’s a bit of talent at my hostel.” But I’d had no idea what that could mean.

  Luisa was a nurse from Melbourne who was also backpacking through Europe. She’d invited me out for drinks with some guy named Sean—he was staying at another hostel and was a friend of her ex-boyfriend Marty. But I was exhausted from the overnight train from Nice. My contacts were sticky. I told her maybe.

  Then Sean bounded up the stairs. His tall, lanky body didn’t seem solid enough to contain his energy and enthusiasm. Wire glasses slipped down his angular, crooked nose. But he was definitely good-looking, as promised.

  We started barhopping along La Rambla. Sean and I flirted over bottles of Estrella Damm. He also f
lirted with a couple of blond Swiss girls he’d brought along from his own hostel, and a Kiwi chick with blue eye shadow. Yet he got annoyed when I started to flirt with an Irish bartender. Sean kept pulling the hood of my jacket down over my head. And we got into the usual Sydney vs. Melbourne debate. I’d only visited Melbourne a couple of times and was unimpressed, but I’d loved living in Sydney during my junior year abroad.

  Sean was unwavering and bold. “I’ll make you love Melbourne more than Sydney once I get the chance to show you around.” Which made me laugh.

  The next morning Luisa and I moved into Sean’s hostel near Plaça de Catalunya. Angie, the owner, was wiry with a manic energy. Her place was cleaner and cheaper, with no midnight curfew or daytime lockout policy. Angie and Sean danced and bounced around the hostel together, Sean wearing purple-striped thermal leggings and a Futbol Club Barcelona scarf he’d just bought.

  That night, Sean was up for another one on the town, but Luisa wanted to catch up on her journal and postcards.

  “You’ll come with me for drinks, won’t you?” he asked.

  We made our way through crowded streets to the coast and to the bars along the water. I braced against the cold, winter ocean wind and pulled a tube of ChapStick from my jacket pocket.

  “Can I have some of that lip stuff?” Sean asked.

  It was such a bad line, I never saw it coming. Without looking up, I started to pass him the tube. Instead, he leaned in and he kissed me.

  • • •

  After that first kiss, I fell for Sean fast and I fell for him hard. It was the end of January in 1999. I was twenty-four and he was twenty-two. He had a broad working-class Australian accent, honest blue eyes that wrinkled at the edges when he smiled, and his entire body bent double when he laughed. Together with Luisa and Sascha, a law student from Sydney, we traveled first to Granada and then took the ferry farther south to Morocco. But Sascha left us in Essaouria to return to his studies, and Luisa had decided three was a crowd by the time we made it back up to Lagos.