The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  He finds a nest of fishing tackle washed up on the rocks, untangles the monofilament and coils it around a block of driftwood. Around the dull and rusty hook he sheathes an earthworm; he weights the line and lowers it into the sea from a ledge. Some nights he manages to hook a salmon, grab it around the tail and knock its head against a rock. In the moonlight he lays it on a flat stone and eviscerates it with a piece of oyster shell. The meat he roasts over a tiny fire and eats thoughtlessly, chewing as he scuttles back up the rocks, into the woods. He does not think of taste; he goes about eating in the same manner he might go about digging a hole: it is a job, vaguely troubling, hardly satisfying.

  The mansion, like the garden, swings into life. Every night there are the sounds of parties: music, the clink of silver against china, laughter. He can smell their cigarettes, their fried potatoes, the gasoline of landscapers’ weedeaters and tractors. Cars rotate through the driveway. One afternoon Twyman appears on the deck and begins firing a shotgun into the trees. He is dressed in shorts and dark socks and stumbles across the planks of the deck. He reloads the gun, shoulders it, fires. Joseph crouches against a trunk. Does he know? Has Twyman seen him out there? The shot tears through the leaves.

  By mid-June the stems of his plants are inches high. When he sticks his face close he can see that several of the buds have separated into delicate flowers; what looked like a solid green shoot was actually a tightly folded blossom. He feels like shouting with joy. Because of their pale, toothed leaflets, he decides some of the seedlings might be tomatoes, so he tries to construct small trellises with sticks and vine, as his mother used to do with wire and string, upon which the plants might climb. When he finishes he picks his way down the hillside to the sea and kicks a depression in the dunes and sleeps.

  An hour later he wakes to see a sneaker shuffle past, hardly ten yards away. Adrenaline rockets to the tips of his fingers. His heart riots inside his chest. The sneaker is small, clean, white. Its mate moves past him, dragging through the sand, moving toward the sea.

  He could run. Or he could ambush the person, claw him to death or drown him or fill his throat with sand. He could rise screaming and improvise from there. But there is no time for anything—on his stomach he flattens himself as much as possible and hopes his shape in the darkness resembles driftwood, or a tangled mess of kelp.

  But the sneakers do not slow. Their owner labors down the front of the dunes, stooped and straining, lugging in the basket of its arms what looks to Joseph like a pair of cinder blocks. When it crosses the tideline Joseph raises his head and makes out features: curly, unbound hair, small shoulders, thin ankles. A girl. There is something wrong with the way she carries her head, the way it lolls on her neck, the way her shoulders ride so low—she looks defeated, overcome. She stops often to rest; her legs strain beneath her as she muscles her load forward. Joseph lowers his eyes, feels the cool sand against his chin, and tries to calm his heartbeat. Above him the clouds have blown away, and the spray of stars sends a frail light onto the sea.

  When he looks again the girl is a hundred feet away. In the surf she squats with what looks like a bight of rope and runs it through the holes in a cinder block—she seems to be lashing her wrist to it. As he watches she fastens one wrist to one block, the other to the other. Then she struggles to her feet, dragging the blocks and staggering into the water. Waves clap against her chest. The blocks drop into the water with heavy splashes. She goes to her knees, then to her back, and floats, arms pulled behind and under her, still affixed to the cinder blocks. The flux of water bears her up, then closes over her chin and she is gone.

  Joseph understands: the cinder blocks will hold her down and she will drown.

  He lets his forehead back down against the sand. There is only the sound of waves collapsing against the shore and that starlight, faint and clean, reflecting off the mica in the sand. It is the same all over the world, Joseph thinks, in the smallest hours of the night. He wonders what would have happened if he had decided to sleep elsewhere, if he had spent one more hour framing trellises in the garden, if his seedlings had failed to shoot. If he had never seen an ad in a newspaper. If his mother had not gone to market that day. Order, chance, fate: it does not matter what brought him here. The stars burn in their constellations. Beneath the surface of the ocean countless lives are being lived out every minute.

  He runs down the dunes and dives into the water. She floats just below the waves, her eyes closed; her hair washed out in a fan. Her shoelaces, untied, drift in the current. Her arms disappear beneath her into the murk.

  She is, Joseph realizes, Twyman’s daughter.

  He dives under and lifts one of the cinder blocks from the sand and frees her wrist. With his arms beneath her body, dragging the other block, he hauls her onto the sand. “Everything is okay,” he tries to say, but his voice is unused and it cracks and the words do not come. For a long moment nothing happens. Goose pimples stand up on her throat and arms. Then she coughs and her eyes fly open. She scrambles up, one arm still tied to its anchor, and flails her feet. “Wait,” Joseph says. “Wait.” He reaches down and lifts the block and frees her wrist. She pulls back, terrified. Her lips tremble; her arms shake. He can see how young she is—maybe fifteen years old, small pearls in her earlobes, big eyes above pink, unmarked cheeks. Water pours from her jeans. Her shoelaces trail in the sand.

  “Please,” he says. “Don’t.” But she is already gone, running hard and fast over the slope of the dunes, in the direction of the house.

  Joseph shivers; the ragged blanket he still wears over his shoulders drips. If she tells someone, he considers, there will be searches. Twyman will comb the woods with his shotgun; his guests will make a game of capturing the trespasser in the woods. He must not let them find the garden. He must find a new place to sleep, acres away from the house, a damp depression in a thicket or—better still—a hole in the ground. And he will stop making fires; he will eat only those things he is willing to eat cold. He will visit the garden only every third night, only in the darkest, deepest hours, carrying water to his plants, being careful to cover his tracks. . . .

  Out on the sea the reflected stars quiver and shake. The crest of each wave is limned with light, a thousand white rivers running together—it is beautiful. It is, he thinks, the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He watches, shivering, until the sun begins to color the sky behind him, then trots down the beach, into the forest.

  Four nights later: jazz, a woman on the porch making slow turns in the twilight, her skirt flaring out. Softly he creeps into his garden to weed, to yank out intruders. The music washes through the trees, piano, a saxophone. He strains to see the shoots standing up from the dirt. Blight—tiny bull’s-eyes of rot—stains many of the leaves. A slug is chewing another shoot and a few of the plants have been cropped off at the ground. Over half the seedlings are dead or dying. He knows he should fence off the garden, spray the plants with something to protect them. He ought to construct a blind and stake out whatever is grazing the garden, scare it off or bludgeon it with the hoe. But he cannot—he can hardly afford the luxury of weed pulling. Everything must be done softly, must be made to look untended.

  No longer does he go down to the shore or cross the lawns of the estate—they make him feel exposed, naked. He prefers the cover of the woods, the towering firs, the patches of giant clover and groves of maples; here is just one of many, here he is small.

  With a flashlight she begins searching the woods at night. He knows it is she because he has hidden in a hollowed nurse log and waited for her to pass; first the light swinging frantically through the ferns, then her pinched, scared face, eyes unblinking. She moves noisily, snapping twigs, breathing hard on the hills. But she is determined; her light prowls the woods, ranges over the dunes, hurries across the lawn. Every night for a week he watches the light drifting across the property like a displaced star.

  Once, in a moment of courage, he calls hello, but she doesn’t hear. She continues on, steppin
g down through the dark shapes of the trees, the noise of her passage and the beam of the light growing fainter until they finally disappear.

  On a stump not a hundred yards from his garden she begins leaving food: a tuna sandwich, a bag of carrots, a napkin full of chips. He eats them but feels slightly guilty about it, as if he’s cheating, as if it’s unfair that she’s making it easier for him.

  After another week of midnights, watching her blunder through the forest, he cannot stand it anymore and places himself in the field of her light. She stops. Her eyes, already wide, widen. She switches off her flashlight and sets it in the leaves. A pale fog hovers in the branches. They have a sort of standoff. The girl does not seem threatened although she keeps her hands just off her hips like a gunfighter.

  Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph.

  He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

  “I don’t understand.” His voice cracks from disuse. He waves toward the house. “Go away. I’m sorry. You must not come through here anymore. Someone will come looking for you.” But the girl is running through the routine a third time, rolling her hand, tapping her chest, moving her lips in silence.

  And then Joseph sees; he places his hands over his ears. The girl nods.

  “You cannot hear?” She shakes her head. “But you know what I say? You understand?” She nods again. She points to her lips, then opens her hands like a book: lip-reading.

  She pulls a notebook from her shirt and opens it. With a pencil hung around her neck, she scribbles. She holds the page out. In the dimness he reads: How do you live?

  “I eat what I can. I sleep in the leaves. I have all I need. Please go home, Miss. Go to bed.”

  I won’t tell, she writes.

  When she leaves he watches the light bob and sweep until it becomes just a spark, a firefly spiraling through the gloom. He is surprised when he realizes it makes him lonely, watching the light fade, as if, although he told her to go, he had hoped she would stay.

  Two nights later, full moon, her light is back, wobbling through the forest. He knows he should leave; he should start walking north and not stop until he is a hundred miles into Canada. Instead he paces through the leaves, finally goes to her. She is wearing jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a knapsack over her shoulders. She switches off the light as before. Moonlight spills over the boughs, sends a patchwork of shadows shifting over their shoulders. He leads her through the bramble, past the verbena, to a ledge overlooking the sea. At the horizon a lone freighter blinks its tiny light.

  “I almost did it too,” he says. “The thing you tried to do.” She holds her hands before her like two thin and pale birds. “I was leaning over the bow of a tanker, looking down at the waves a hundred feet below. We were in the middle of the ocean. All I needed to do was push with my feet and I would have gone over.”

  She writes in her pad. I thought you were an angel. I thought you had come to take me to heaven.

  “No,” Joseph says. “No.” She looks at him, looks away. Why did you come back? she writes. After you got fired?

  The light of the ship begins to fade. “Because it’s beautiful here,” he says. “Because I had nowhere else to go.”

  A night later they again face each other in the dimness. Her hands flutter in front of her, rolling in loops, rising to her neck, her eyes. She touches an elbow, points at him.

  “I’m going for water,” he says. “You can come if you like.”

  She follows him down through the forest until they reach the stream. He leans over a lichened rock, finds his rusty drum, and fills it. They climb back through the ferns and moss and deadfall to the top of the hill. He pulls aside some cut boughs of spruce.

  “This is my garden,” he says, and steps in among the plants, tendrils clinging greenly to their trellises, creepers running out over the bare soil. In the air there is the fragrance of earth and leaf and sea. “This is why I came back. I needed to do this. It’s why I stay.”

  In the nights to come she visits the garden and they crouch among the plants. She brings him a blanket and a baguette he reluctantly chews. She brings him a book of sign language—several thousand cartoon drawings of hands, each with a word beneath. There are hands above tree, hands above bicycle, hands above house. He studies the pages, wonders how anyone could ever learn all the signs. Her name is Belle, he learns: he practices making it in the air with his long, clumsy fingers.

  He teaches her to find pests—slugs, iridescent beetles, aphids, tiny red spider mites—and crush them between her fingers. Some of the vines have grown knee high; they range across the soil; rain pops against the leaves. “What is it like?” he asks her. “Is it very quiet? Is it silent?” She doesn’t see him speak or else chooses not to answer. She sits and stares down at the house.

  She brings a plant food that they mix with creek water and pour over the rows. Each time she leaves he finds himself watching her go, her body moving down through the trees, finally appearing down on the lawn, a dim silhouette slipping back into the house.

  Some nights, sitting among ferns far from the garden, watching headlights creep down 101 in the distance, he clamps his palms over his ears and tries to imagine what it must be like. He shuts his eyes, tries to quiet himself. For a moment he thinks he has it; a kind of void, a nothingness, an oblivion. But it doesn’t—it cannot—last; there is always noise, the flux and murmur of his body’s machinery, a hum in his head. His heart beats and flexes in its cage. His body, in those moments, sounds to him like an orchestra, a rock band, an entire prison of inmates crowded into one cell. What must it be like to not hear that? To never know even the whisper of your own pulse?

  The garden explodes into life; Joseph gets the impression it would grow even if the world was plunged into permanent darkness. Each night there are changes; clusters of green spheres materialize and swell on the tomato stems; yellow flowers emerge from the vines like burning lamps. He begins to wonder if the large, bushy creepers are zucchini after all—maybe they are squash, some kind of gourds.

  But they are melons. Days later he and Belle find six pale spheres sitting in the soil under the broad leaves. Each night they seem to grow larger, drawing more mass from the earth. They nearly glow in the midnight. He cakes their flanks with mud, patting them down, hiding them. He coats the tomatoes, too—it seems to him that their pale yellows and reds must shine like beacons, easily visible from the lawns of the estate, too outrageous to miss.

  She is in the garden, sitting and staring down at the house, and he leaves the cover of the forest to join her. He taps her shoulder and makes the sign for night, and the sign for how are you. Her face brightens; her fingers flash a response.

  “Slow down, slow down,” laughs Joseph. “Good night was as far as I got.”

  She smiles, stands, brushes off her knees. She’s written something on her pad: Something to show you. From her knapsack she takes a map and unfolds it over the dirt. It is worn along its creases and very soft. When he takes the whole thing in, he can see that it is a map of the entire Pacific Coast of the Americas, beginning with Alaska and ending at Tierra del Fuego.

  Belle points at herself, then the map. She draws her finger down a series of highways, all north-south, that she has highlighted in color. Then she places her hands on an imaginary steering wheel and mimes driving a car.

  “You want to drive this? You are going to drive this far?”

  Yes, she nods. Yes. She leans forward and with her pencil, writes, When I turn sixteen I get a Volkswagen. From my father.

  “Can you even drive?”

  She shakes her head, holds up ten fingers, then six. When I’m six
teen.

  He studies the map awhile. “Why? I don’t get it.”

  She looks away. She makes a series of signs he does not know. On the paper she writes, I want to leave, and underlines it furiously. The tip of the pencil breaks.

  “Belle,” Joseph says. “No one could drive that far. There probably aren’t even roads the whole way.” She is looking at him; her mouth hangs open.

  “You are, what, fifteen years old? You cannot drive to South America. You would be kidnapped. You would run out of petrol.” He laughs, then, and puts his hand over his mouth. After a moment he begins to work, his fingers prying a leaf miner from the underside of a melon. Belle studies her map in the paling light.

  When he looks up she is gone, her light moving quickly down the hillside, disappearing. He watches the thin shape of her hurry across the lawn.

  She stops coming into the woods. As far as he can tell, she stops going outside altogether. Maybe she uses the front door, he thinks. He wonders how long she’d harbored that strange dream—to drive from Oregon to Tierra del Fuego, alone, a deaf girl.

  A week passes and Joseph finds himself crouching beside the trail to the beach, sleeping on the fringes of the dunes, waking several times in the afternoon and wandering in a circle, his heart quick-beating. After dawn he studies the sign language book, working his fingers into knots, his hands aching, admiring in his memory the precision of Belle’s signing, the abrupt dips, the way her hands pour together like liquid, then stop, then worry and gnash like the teeth of gears grinding. He never imagined the body could be so eloquent.