by Kate Allen
Mr. Patterson covered my hand with his.
I was never going to look out my window and see Fred dance again. And I would never have fifty more years with my mom, whom everyone seemed to know better than I did. I closed my eyes and focused on the cymbal taps.
I woke up with my head against the window and pulled off the headphones. I closed my eyes again, already half asleep when I heard Sookie say quietly, “How’s Lucy doing?”
Dad breathed in through his nose and shook his head. “Well, she ate dinner last night and breakfast today, so that seemed good. But maybe I gotta work harder on getting her out of the house. Getting her mind on something else. Trouble is, she used to do everything with Fred. I mean everything.”
“But she’s not sittin’ around the house. It was her idea to go to Maine. And she’s been tryin’ to figure out Helen’s paper. And she learned how to gut fish. That’s doing somethin’.”
“I guess so,” Dad said.
“How are you doing on the couch?” Sookie asked.
“What?”
“What’s it like going from being a workaholic to this?”
Dad hesitated. I kept my eyes closed.
“Well, I hate it,” Dad said. “When I was keeping busy, I didn’t worry so much about the things I couldn’t fix. Now I lie around and the sharks make me think of Helen. And my foot makes me think of Fred. And Fred makes me think of how easily it could have been Lucy who drowned.”
It was quiet for a long time. The car moved past the lights of a highway rest stop, breaking the darkness a couple of times.
“You know what Helen would say?” Sookie asked.
“What?”
“Don’t resist pain,” Sookie said.
My eyes were wide-open.
“What?” I asked, sitting up.
Dad looked over his shoulder. “How long have you been awake?” he asked.
“A while,” I said. “Who wants pain?”
“Uh, no one. But when you feel sad or angry or afraid, let yourself feel it,” Sookie said. “That’s all she meant.”
“Don’t try to turn it off,” Dad added.
“Oh. When did she tell you that?” I tapped Sookie on the head.
“I don’t know. A few times, I guess,” Sookie said. “Probably when my dog died. When I got divorced. When my dad drove the boat into the side of a bridge.”
“I’ve been feeling pain all summer,” I said. “Now what?”
“Yeah, now what?” Dad said.
Sookie looked at Dad and shrugged. “I don’t know!”
“Adapt!” Mr. Patterson yelled. “Adjust!”
I thought he was asleep. He closed his eyes again, and in a minute, I could hear him breathing, his head against the back shelf of the Diplomat. I dragged my backpack out of the darkness, onto my lap and slowly pulled the zipper. I took out the flashlight and Mom’s research proposal and flipped to the section where she explains how the fisherman would tag the shark. As usual, my eyes zeroed in on the pictures. There was a crude outline of an adult male on the pulpit of a harpoon boat. He had no features, like a homicide chalk drawing, and he was facing me, instead of showing his profile and going after the great whites like he was supposed to be doing. I got this devilish feeling and I picked up a pencil and started filling in Sookie’s features. I gave him a pair of Oakley sunglasses and a four-day-old beard. I drew a tank top and a pair of waders like he wore on the boat. I put a Moxie can beside him on the pulpit. I wrote Sookie above his head and made an arrow, in case there was any question. Part of me looked down in horror at how I’d defaced Mom’s work, but the other part of me giggled. If I was going to be the census taker, then this was my research paper and I could give Sookie a farmer’s tan if I wanted to.
I blew some eraser dust off the paper and into the dark. Sure enough, there was the spotter plane that we’d all talked about in Vern’s study, the one that was going to locate the sharks for the fisherman to tag. Vern Devine wasn’t talking crazy at all.
27. Dr. Robin Walker
A couple of days went by without a reply from Fred—no kayak-chasing sharks or unmistakable fins in the newspaper. It was possible that I would have taken anything as a message from Fred, like a new Jaws T-shirt in the window at the Chinese imports shop, or a cartoon shark pushing a lawnmower on the side of a landscaping trailer. It didn’t have to be a real, live one. I just wanted a sign.
I brought my sketch pad and backpack upstairs to Mom’s office and plopped everything on the floor beside her desk. I opened up the windows to let the breeze in and blow out the smell of old air and silverfish. At the desk, I flipped through the drawings, looking at all the sketches of shark parts—fins, teeth, and vertebrae. It was August. School was creeping up in a few weeks. If I was going to finish the Great White Shark page, so I could pass in the field guide to Ms. Solomon, I needed to get down to business. But when I looked at the sketch pad, all I had were puzzle pieces of the shark, when I needed to have a complete portrait.
I gnawed on my eraser.
I pulled Mom’s research proposal out of my bag and opened to the page where I’d given Mom’s fisherman a beard and a can of Moxie. I giggled at how ridiculous it looked. Then, I looked from left to right on the desktop.
My dorsal fin sketches.
Her tagging drawings.
My dorsal fin sketches.
Her tagging drawings.
It was eerie how close my work had become to hers.
Everything on Mom’s desk had been pretty much untouched. In fact, there was a layer of dust on the lamp, the Rolodex, and the stapler. I moved our work to the floor, took off my sock, and started dusting everything. When I couldn’t get all of the dirty bits, I grabbed a damp washcloth and a dry one from the bathroom and went over the desk again.
I put everything back on the desktop where it had been before, but when I set down the Rolodex, the mini-filing cabinet with all of the names of people she knew and worked with, it flopped open to a name. ROBIN WALKER.
Her business card was stapled to the Rolodex card. It was clearly outdated since it didn’t say, Dr. Robin Walker. I wondered if Robin knew anything about the tags. I dialed the number.
“Cat Cove Marine Laboratory. This is Robin.”
“Hi, Dr. Walker,” I said. “This is Lucy Everhart. Helen Everhart’s daughter. Did you used to work—”
“Lucy!” she said. “How are you?”
“Doing okay,” I said. “How ’bout you?”
“No complaints. To what do I owe this honor?” she asked.
“What?”
“What can I do for you?”
“Uh, I found one of Mom’s research proposals. The one called, ‘Proposal for Cape Cod White Shark and Gray Seal Study.’”
There was a pause.
“I know the one you are talking about,” said Robin.
I felt a layer of sweat break out on my upper lip.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out,” I said. “I get that the spotter plane sees the shark in the water and the fisherman tags the shark with a harpoon, but can you tell me how the tags work?”
“Sure,” she said. I could tell from her voice that she was surprised that I was asking. “They’re acoustic tags. Acoustic tags use sonar. Each tag has a transmitter that sends sound pulses into the water,” Robin said. “So when a tagged shark swims within a couple of hundred meters of the hydrophone, it makes a ping.”
There was a lot of technical vocabulary flying around, but I wanted to make sense of what she was saying, so I just kept asking questions.
“Can you actually hear the pings?” I said.
“Not with human ears, but the system that we helped design mixes the signal with another frequency of sound, so you can hear the pings through a set of headphones. And to follow a shark, you follow its pings.”
“That’s crazy!”
I said.
“And each tag is set at a different frequency, so you can differentiate between the sharks.”
“What?” I said.
“Each tag has its own special ping,” said Robin.
“So each shark with a tag makes its own noise?” I asked.
“Basically,” she said.
I pictured sharks in the ocean, calling out their own names as they swam by.
“We’ve been trying to build and fund the equipment for years,” Robin said. “But it’s happening, Lucy. We hope to tag our first sharks by the end of the summer.”
“What?” I said. “This is happening?”
“Oh, it’s happening,” she said.
“Wow,” I said. “Were you one of the biologists who worked with Mom and Vern on the study?”
“Yes, I worked with your mom on that project. We all miss her. It took Ray and me a long time to be able to envision moving forward without her.”
I smiled. “Is Ray another biologist?”
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ve been seeing the sharks in the news,” I said. “We even had one in Rockport.”
“Sookie’s shark,” she said. “I know. Ray and I were stuck at a conference. We wanted to do a necropsy on that one.”
“I forgot that you know Sookie,” I said, looking down at the bearded fisherman standing in the pulpit in Mom’s proposal.
Robin sighed. “We’ve been calling him for a while, hoping that he would follow through and be our tagger, our captain. But it’s okay. We have a couple of other leads.”
“You called him recently?” I asked.
“Over the winter,” said Robin. “He was good friends with your mother for a very long time. I think he was genuinely interested in the project, but I think it was mostly a big favor to your mom.”
“Why are you tagging them?” I asked. “What kind of information can you get?”
“We can tag the sharks and maybe, while they come here to eat, we can keep an eye on them to figure out why they do what they do. Figure out how many are coming to the area and who’s returning.”
“The census,” I said. I told Robin about going to visit Vern, how he thought I was my mom and told me to keep collecting data.
“That’s exactly what we’re doing,” she said.
“And the fisherman aims the harpoon at the shark and the shark is tagged?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s tricky work. The shark is a moving target and you really need to get that tag right at the sweet spot at the base of the dorsal fin.”
“It doesn’t hurt the shark?” I asked.
“It shouldn’t,” she said. “We’ve been tagging other types of fish for years with no negative effects.”
I looked down at the desk.
My dorsal fin sketches.
Her tagging drawings.
“It’s funny,” I said. “I didn’t pay much attention to Mom’s work when she was here. She was just my mom. But since Sookie’s shark, something is different. I’m working on a project for school. I’ve been spending a lot of my time drawing shark parts in my sketchbook. Trying to figure out how they work.”
“That’s pretty much what I do every day,” she said.
“Right.”
“You went all the way to Maine to ask Vern about the study?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” she said. “If you have any other questions, call me anytime.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“And if you see Sookie, tell him we pay big money.”
“You do?” I asked.
She laughed. “Not really.”
After I hung up with Robin, I ran downstairs to tell Dad what I’d learned about the tags and the pings. He was on one crutch, sifting through the mail on the kitchen table.
“Hey, Dad,” I began.
But he interrupted and extended a postcard to me. It was the photo of Miles Davis wearing the bug-eyed glasses from Fred’s bulletin board. My heart was beating triple time, waiting to see who’d sent it.
“Who’s it from?” Dad asked.
“Fiona,” I said, still thinking about her question. She was right. Fred had never cared about what he looked like. He’d rather get ten more minutes of sleep than shower before school.
“Was Fred acting weird to you?” I asked. “Over the summer?”
Dad scrunched his lips together. “I don’t think so, but you’d know better.”
I made a fart noise with my mouth. I had no clue.
I ran upstairs and stuck the postcard to my bulletin board, Miles’s face looking out with a deep crease in his forehead above his nose. I could barely see his eyes through the glasses, but he looked annoyed.
28. Gin Rummy
The next morning, i fed two postcards into the mailbox outside of the bookstore. One was wearing a stamp and the other was unstamped. I stood there making a wish to Fred. Send me a shark, will you? A real one this time.
I closed the door and was about to pedal back home, when Mr. Scanlon, the school adjustment counselor, walked out of the bookstore. He was a short man with a light-brown mustache. He wore a summery button-down shirt and sandals—and while I had never seen Jimmy Buffett before, I imagined this was what he looked like. Mr. Scanlon had a brown paper bag under his arm. He turned toward the side that was opposite of the mailbox and I could have slipped away undetected, except that I called out, “Hi, Mr. Scanlon.”
He looked over his shoulder and walked back toward me, surprised.
“Lucy?” he asked, unsure of my name. Good Lord, I thought everybody in town knew who I was. Maybe he was just spacey with faces.
“Yup,” I said.
“Nice to meet you.”
He put out his hand and looked at me with a furrowed brow. “You’re at the top of my list for the fall.”
“For what?” I said, shaking his small hand.
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“Whatever you’d like.” And he said it really sincerely, which made me feel like a jerk.
“Well, you want to talk now?” I asked, shrugging.
“Sure,” he said.
“There’s a bench at the bottom of the hill,” I said, leading him down to the landing beside the bookstore that overlooked Front Beach. I ditched my bike and took a seat.
“How are you doing today?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said. “Today feels okay.”
Mr. Scanlon looked at me with a calm face. Counselors and therapists were always comfortable with eye contact and long stretches of awkward silence. I wasn’t, probably because I didn’t know this guy and probably because he was waiting for me to unload the horrors of the summer. We sat for a few moments in total quiet.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asked.
“Nothing really,” I said.
“Do you want to play cards?” he asked.
“You brought cards?”
“Hmm-mmm,” he said, pulling a pack from his back pocket.
“Sure,” I said. I scooted to the edge and he shuffled the cards against the granite bench.
“What do you want to play?” he asked. “Garbage? War?”
“How ’bout gin rummy?” I asked.
He looked up at me and smiled. “Who taught you how to play gin rummy?”
“My neighbor, Mr. Patterson.”
Mr. Scanlon nodded and he cut the deck.
“Have you known Mr. Patterson a long time?”
“Like, forever,” I said. “He is pretty old. Maybe ninety.”
Mr. Scanlon nodded and dealt us ten cards apiece. “What’s he like?”
“He’s a good guy. He sits on his porch a lot in his undershirt, listening to a police scanner. Which is a little weird, but I like it because he’s always there if
I need anything. He still plays the French horn with the American Legion band on Sunday nights.”
I picked up my cards and fanned them out in my palm, grouping the queens together and ordering a run of hearts. Mr. Scanlon took a card from the stockpile and placed it faceup on the bench. Four of clubs.
“You can go first,” he said.
I shrugged and took another card from the stockpile.
“Why do counselors always play games with kids?” I asked, discarding a jack.
“I guess we’re not very original,” he said. “Have you played gin rummy with another counselor before?”
“No, but I used to play Memory with the elementary school counselor, Ms. Watts. When I was little.”
He nodded, picking up another card and putting it in the discard pile.
“You know my mom died, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “How old were you?”
“Seven,” I said, picking up the fourth queen. “She had a brain aneurysm. She went fast.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking up from his cards. “That must have been very hard.”
“It was,” I said. “But I don’t think I need to talk about that.”
“No? What do you need to talk about?” he asked.
“Fred,” I said. “The accident.”
“Okay,” Mr. Scanlon said.
There was another pause in conversation. I chose a three of spades from the stockpile and discarded it. Mr. Scanlon picked it up and put down an ace.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
I let out a breath and picked up another heart. He picked up my trash and slipped it into his hand. “Go ahead.”
I took a five of diamonds from the stockpile and slid it beside a five of spades in my hand. “I’ve been writing postcards to Fred.”
“Since he passed away?” Mr. Scanlon asked.
“Yup,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said, looking at me with a half smile.
“Well, things pop into my head during the day. Things I used to save for Fred.”
