The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  Dorotea holds the fly gently in her palm. The neck wrapped with perfect tiny wraps. Did you paint this? The eyes?

  Sure. Tied the whole thing. He reaches in his pocket, removes a paper bag. Pours its contents onto her palm. Dorotea sees three more flies, yellow, blue, brown. Imagines how they must look in the water, to a fish. Long and thin. Like little fish. Like a snack. Perfect. Marvelous. Soft beauty lashed to sharp steel.

  He is casting again, splashing down the coast.

  Dorotea follows. The water higher on her shins than before.

  Wait, she says. Your hooks. Your streamers.

  You keep them, he says. I’ll tie more.

  She refuses. But does not take her eyes from them.

  He casts. Sure, he says. A gift.

  She shakes her head but puts them in her pocket. The wave-break laps her knees. She studies the sea, looks for signs of sealife. Fins bending? Sea creatures leaping? She sees only the sun laying gold coins across the waves, the ever-retreating fog. When she looks up the fisherboy has nearly rounded the point. She splashes after. Watches him cast. The waves sough as they collapse.

  Hey, she says, there’s fish out there, right? Or you wouldn’t be fishing.

  The boy smiles. Sure. It’s the ocean.

  Somehow, I thought there would be more. More stuff in the ocean. More fish. Where I’m from there’s nothing and I hoped that maybe here there would be and I thought there was but now it just seems huge and empty.

  The boy turns to look at her. Laughs. Lets his line drop, bends and reaches into the water at his feet. Digs into the mud, brings up a fistful.

  Look here, he says.

  In the dark clump Dorotea sees nothing at first. Mud clots dripping. Shell fragments. Water droplets. Then she notices microscopic movement, translucent flecks squirming. Hopping like fleas. The boy shakes his hand. A tiny clam appears on his palm, its foot half-clamped in the shell like a bitten tongue. Also a snail clinging upside-down, its minute unicorn horn shell pointing at the earth. And a tiny translucent crab. Some kind of eel squirming.

  Dorotea pokes the mud with her finger. The boy laughs again, washes his hand in the sea.

  He casts. Says, You haven’t been here before.

  No. She looks out at the sea. Thinks of all the creatures that must be under her feet. Thinks how much she has to learn. Looks at the boy. Asks his name.

  After dark Dorotea stands in her tiny new room and looks around. She tacks a map to the wall. Sits on her sleeping bag and traces the state of Maine with her eye. The land with its borders and capitals and names. Her eye is drawn continually back to the blue that stretches into the fringes.

  A moth hurls itself at her window. In the trees outside insects rasp and scream. Dorotea thinks she can hear the sea. She pulls the bucktail streamers from her pocket to admire them.

  Her father stands in the doorway, knocks softly on the door frame, says hey, sits on the floor beside her. He looks caved in by sleeplessness. His back and shoulders are round.

  Hi, Daddy.

  What do you think?

  It’s so new, Daddy. It’ll take some time. To get used to it.

  She doesn’t talk to me.

  She hardly ever talks to anybody. That’s her way.

  Her father slumps. Gestures with his chin towards the streamers in Dorotea’s hand. What are those?

  Flies. For fishing. Streamers.

  Oh. He does not bother to conceal that he is elsewhere.

  I want to fly-fish, Daddy. Can I tomorrow?

  Her father’s hands open and close. His eyes are open but not seeing. Sure, Dorotea. You can go fishing. Fishing. Claro que sí.

  The door closes behind him. Dorotea holds her breath. Counts to twenty. Hears her dad inhaling slowly in the other room. As if each breath taken summons barely enough courage to take the next.

  She pulls on her brown cardigan, slides open her window and climbs out. She stands in the wet yard. Exhales. The galaxy wheels above the pines.

  The bonfire is in a grove near the point. The wind is clean, the grass drowned with dew. Clouds slide in ranks below the stars. Her sneakers are soaked. Forest mulch clings to her cardigan. She crouches in pine needles outside the circle of firelight, sees dark figures shifting, their warped shadows thrown up into the pines. They sit on logs, stumps. They laugh. She hears the clink of bottles.

  She sees the boy among them, sitting on a log. His smile orange in the firelight. His necklace white. He laughs, tips back a bottle. She holds her breath a long time, almost a minute. She stands, turns to go, steps on a stick and it snaps.

  The laughter fades. She does not move.

  Hey, the boy says. Dorothy?

  Dorotea turns from the shadows, steps out into the firelight, walks with her head down, sits next to the boy.

  Dorothy. Everybody, this is Dorothy.

  The firelit faces look at her, look away. Conversation starts up again.

  Knew you’d come, the boy says.

  Did you.

  Sure I did.

  How did you know?

  Just knew. Felt it. Like I told you, we have these fires every night, just about. I said to myself, you just wait. The girl will come. Dorothy will come. And here you are.

  Did you catch anything today? After I saw you?

  Got a few. I let them go.

  My dad got hired at the ironworks. He designs the hulls of ships.

  Is that right?

  Well, he will. He will do that.

  He holds her hand and her palm is damp with sweat but she holds on and they lock fingers and she can feel his strong hand, rough fingertips. They sit like that a bit and she sits as still as she can. They do not talk. The fire sends smoke high into the trees. The stars wink and gutter. It feels nice being the daughter of a shipbuilder.

  Later he tries to kiss her. Leans across clumsily and his breath is hot on her chin and she clamps her eyes shut. She thinks of her mother, her tiny mother under onions in a train car. She pulls away from the boy, stands and hurries home, head down, through the low-bending pines. She climbs through her bedroom window. Takes off her wet sneakers, hangs her brown cardigan. Listens for the ocean. Thinks of eyes like green medicine. She boils inside.

  In the morning she drags her mother to the sea by the wrist. To confront her with the sea dressed in fog. To show her that this place is not empty. Wings of mist drag through the treetops. The fog shreds everywhere; flashes of pure blue wink above. The sea undressing. A wide-brimmed hat crammed over her mother’s hair. Gulls turn in a high noisy wheel above the gliding tide. Cormorants dive for breakfast.

  They stand on the rocks. Dorotea studies her mother, searches her face for signs of change. Of awakening. Dorotea holds her breath. Counts to twenty. Her mother stands closed and rigid.

  Mentiras, her mother says. Your father doesn’t know a thing about ships. He worked as a janitor all his life. He lied to everybody. Even himself. He’ll be fired today, or tomorrow.

  No, Mama. Daddy’s smart. He’ll find a way. He’ll learn as he goes. He has to. He saw a chance and took it. We’ll make it. Lookit how nice it is. Lookit this place.

  Life can turn out a million ways, Dorotea. Her mother speaks English like she is spitting rocks. But the one way life will not turn out is the way you dream it. You can dream anything, but it’s never what will be. It’s never the way it is. The only thing that can’t come true is your dream. Everything else . . .

  She shuts her mouth, shrugs.

  Dorotea looks at her wet sneakers. The leather is coming apart. She clambers down the steep rocks, grabs hold of weed for balance. Plunges her hand into the mud beneath the water. Holds it up.

  Lookit, Mama. Lookit all the things that live here. In just one handful.

  Mother squints at her daughter. Her daughter holding ocean mud to the sky like some offering.

  And then through the mist a green canoe glides. A lone fisherman, paddling, his rod across the stern. A fisherman with a white necklace on his throat.

&nb
sp; The boy stops in mid-paddle. His oar drips. He studies the two figures on the rocks, the thin and brittle mother with a hand on her hat like she is holding herself to the rock. And the girl, wet to her waist, holding up part of the sea.

  He raises his hand. Smiles. Shouts Dorotea’s name.

  They sell fishing gear in the back of the hardware store in Bath. A giant with a beard and huge round knees sits on a stool tying leaders. Her father looks up at the rack of fishing rods, thumbs up his glasses.

  The giant says, I help you folks?

  My daughter here would like a fishing pole.

  The giant reaches into a cupboard, pulls out a Zebco all-in-one spinning kit. Hands it to Dorotea, says, This’ll be perfect for just about anything you’d ever need. Comes with spinners and everything.

  Dorotea holds the package at arm’s length, studies the reel, the blunt two-piece rod. Chrome-plated guides. The plastic wrap. On the tag a cartoon bass curls out of a cartoon pond to devour a treble-hooked lure. Her dad puts his hand on her head, asks Dorotea how she likes the looks of it.

  She doesn’t like the looks of it at all: it’s blunt, clumsy-looking. No coils of fly line. No elegance. She imagines chunks of flesh glommed on her hook, her reel rusting, the boy laughing at her.

  Daddy, she says. I want a fly rod. This is for bait-fishermen.

  The giant roars. Her father rubs his jaw.

  The giant rings up Dorotea’s fly rod on a black cash register. His huge fingers count change.

  Don’t know a single girl that fly-fishes, the giant says. Never heard of girls fly-fishing, really. He says it kindly. Eyes on Dorotea. Fingers like fat pink cigars.

  I’ve flung a fly myself, he continues. I’m still learning it. I suppose we’re all still learning. You learn and learn and then you die and you haven’t learned half of it.

  He shrugs his hilly shoulders, hands her father change.

  You’re new here. He talks only to Dorotea.

  We just moved to Harpswell, she says. Daddy’s working at Bath Iron Works. He designs ships. It was his first day today.

  The giant nods, glances down at her father. Her father’s hands open, close.

  We lived in Ohio, he mutters. I did hullwork on lake freighters. Thought we’d come up here, give it a shot. A man only gets so many chances is what I figure.

  The giant offers another shrug. Smiles. Says to Dorotea, Maybe we could fish together sometime. We could try down by Popham Beach. They been getting into some nice cows down there. Schoolies race the shallows at slack tide. Get one of those on your little rod there and look out.

  The giant smiles, sits back on his stool. Dorotea and her father leave the store, drive past the ironworks, the shipyard and the vast iron warehouses, a high chain-link fence, cranes swinging, a green-hulled tug at dry dock dripping rust. From the top of Mill Street Dorotea can see the Kennebec River rolling heavily into the Atlantic.

  In the evening Dorotea sits on her sleeping bag and fits her rod together. Two pieces join together, screw on the plastic reel, feed fly line through the guides. Tie on a leader.

  Her dad in the door frame.

  You like the rod, Dorotea?

  It’s beautiful, Daddy. Thank you.

  You going to fish in the morning?

  In the morning.

  Your mother say anything?

  Dorotea shakes her head. She thinks he will say more but he doesn’t.

  After he leaves she holds her breath, takes her new fly rod, and climbs out her window. She walks beneath the dark pines, feels her way in the moonless night. She reaches the firelight, hears a guitar and singing, sees the boy on his log. She crouches under the pines and watches. Thinks of her father saying a man only gets so many chances. Puts her hand in her pocket. Feels the three streamers there, their hook points, their feathers. She shuts her eyes. Her hands shake. A hook pricks her finger.

  She stands, balks, turns around, walks to her left, to the ocean. She clambers over rocks, shadows among shadows. Stands at the sea’s fringe, sucks a drop of blood from her fingertip. She has the shakes. Holds her breath to fight them.

  She holds the air in her lungs and stands very still and listens. The silence of Harpswell rises up in her ear like a wave and breaks into a rainbow of tiny sounds: an owl calling, the faint sound of laughter at the bonfire, the pines creaking, cicadas screeching, resting, screeching. Rodents rustling in blackberry brambles. Pebbles clinking. Leaves shifting. Even clouds marching. And beneath, the murmuring sea benched in fog. This is indeed a full world, Dorotea. It overspills. She breathes, tastes the salty ocean cycle of rot and birth. Takes up her rod and feeds the line clumsily through the guides. Whips it behind her. It snags on something. She turns.

  The boy is there. His fingertips on her shoulders, the sleeves of her cardigan. His eyes on hers.

  Her mother stands in Dorotea’s room in the dark. Her hands on her hips like she is trying to crush her own pelvis. Her black shoes planted firmly. Dorotea straddles the window frame, one leg in, one out. Her fly rod half into her room. Her dew-soaked sneaker stuck all over with pine needles.

  I thought I told you not to see that boy.

  What boy?

  Who called you Dorothy.

  The boy in the canoe?

  You know what boy.

  You don’t. You don’t know him. I don’t either.

  Her mother stares. Her body quakes, tendons in her throat stand out. Dorotea holds her breath. Holds it so long she feels sick.

  I wasn’t with him, Mama. I was fishing. Or trying to. I got a terrible tangle in my line. I wasn’t with him.

  Pescador. Pescadora.

  I went out fishing.

  From then on Dorotea is imprisoned after dark. Her mother does it herself: she screws long bolts into Dorotea’s window, hammers it shut. Dorotea’s door locked at night. She stares at her maps.

  The summer rolls forward in silence. The rented house cramped and creaky. Every day her father leaves at dawn, comes home late. Dinners are eaten silently. Her mother’s face retreats inside itself like a poked sea anemone. Silverware clinking, a platter on the table. Beans with the life boiled out of them. Tortillas wrung dry. Please pass the peppers, Mama. The house creaks. The pines whisper. I went fishing today, Daddy. Found a lobster claw long as my foot. Really.

  Dorotea leaves the house just after her father does and she stays out all day. Fishing. Telling herself she is fishing and not looking for the boy. She tramps all the way to South Harpswell, muddy-ankled, walking the sea edge, turning over shells, jabbing anemones with sticks, learning the tiny tricks of shore life. Don’t squeeze a sea cucumber. Scallop shells break easily. Stone crabs hide under driftwood. Check periwinkles for hermit crabs. Snails stay tucked inside murex shells. Stepping on horseshoe crabs doesn’t do anybody any good. Barnacles are good traction. From a hundred feet up a cormorant can hear you split open a sea clam and will turn and dive and land and beg for it. The sea, Dorotea learns, blooms. She learns and relearns it.

  But mostly she fishes. Learning the knots, catching a barbed streamer in her hair, crouching on driftwood to pull out wind-knots or undo massive tangles of leader. Gets her line caught on brambles, on branches, one time on a floating detergent bottle. Learns to walk with her rod, guide it through brush, over rocks. Didn’t even know she needed a tippet. The cork handle on her rod goes dark with salt and sweat. Her brown shoulders go the color of old pennies. Her sneakers rot off her feet. She walks the sea’s edge barefoot, head up. This new Dorotea. This seaside Dorothy.

  She catches nothing. She tries Popham Beach, the long faded spit of sand there, the estuary at ebb tide, at slack tide. She casts from rocky points, from a wooden dock; she wades to her neck and casts. And nothing. Sees men in boats haul in twenty, thirty stripers. Beautiful striped bass with charcoal stripes and translucent mouths gasping. And nothing for her own streamer hooks but greenweed or flotsam. And those awful tangles of leader; line wraps itself around her ankles; knots from nowhere spoil her tippets.
r />   Never a sign of the boy.

  She sees fish out of the water, sturgeon leaping. Sees the ocean violence. Sees a pack of bluefish snarl out of a wave, curl through a panicked cloud of herring, drive half-bitten, quivering smelt onto the sand. Sees a dead cod turn over white and fat in the swash. Sees a tide-beached skate picked apart by gannets, an osprey pluck a whiting from a wavetop.

  One noon she hikes to where they light the bonfires. The sky is gray and low, skimming the treetops. Rain plunks slow and warm. The fire pit black and wet and flat. Beer bottles rolled up against logs, standing on stumps. She walks out to the point, takes off her sweater, wades into the sea. Waves lap at her neck. Her hair floats beside her. She thinks of the boy, his hot breath. His rough fingertips. Those green eyes gone black in the dark.

  Daylong she talks to no one. Each time she rounds a bend, she prays the boy will be there, enwombed in fog, casting, casting for fish, casting for her. But there is only rock and weed and sometimes boats trolling downriver.

  A July night arrives, hangs heavier and wetter than any night Dorotea can remember. The air heavy all day, waiting for a storm that won’t begin. The ocean pewter and flat. The horizon erased in a smear of gray and the sky hung so low it seems to rest on top of the rented house; any moment it might collapse the roof. Night comes but does not break the heat.

  Dorotea sits in her bedroom and sweats. She feels the sky threatening to bury her.

  Her father stands in the door frame. Sweat circles under his arms. He used to get those when he mopped floors. Her dad the shipbuilder.

  Hiya Dorotea.

  Daddy it’s hot.

  Only thing for it is to wait.

  Can’t we get her to open the window? Just for tonight. I’ll never sleep. I’m sweating through my sleeping bag.

  I don’t know, Dorotea.

  Please, Daddy. It’s so hot.

  Maybe we could leave the door open.

  The window, Daddy. Mama’s asleep. She’ll never know. Just for tonight.

  Her father breathes. His shoulders slumped, rounded. Comes back with a screwdriver. Quietly unbolts the window, pries the nails loose.