by Kate Allen
I reached up to place the book by Cousteau and Cousteau in a gap on the high shelf and saw a black box that had a little metal placard, like an empty placeholder for a name tag.
“What’s in this one?’ I asked, pulling down the box. It had a lid and was the size of a shoebox for kids with wide feet. I removed the lid of the nameless box. Videotapes.
I brought them down to the rug and pulled each one out of the box. The last three read:
Basking shark necropsy
WHOI lecture series
Nature documentary
For some reason, the one marked “Nature documentary” made my scalp buzz. I stood up and fed the tape into the TV/VCR combo in the corner. The screen was covered in dust, like a light snowfall, and I wiped the glass clear with my shirt.
The tape began in the middle of an interview with Mom. I recognized it immediately. There she was with her hair blowing softly around her face and her shoulders moving with the gentle sway of the boat. It was the same TV footage that Fred and I watched the day that Sookie had hauled the white shark into Rockport.
“Holy fish,” I whispered, with a rock in my gut.
“Am I afraid? Being in the water with sharks?” Mom grinned. “No. You just have to remember that you are swimming in their home. You have to know how to behave when you are the guest.”
I didn’t remember her ever filming this, but then again, when she was here, I never had paid much attention to what she did when she wasn’t with me.
But I was fixated now.
“There is so much we don’t know about them,” she said. “Where they go and why, or how many there are? What do their behaviors mean? And people fear what they don’t know. If we knew more about sharks, maybe we would be in a better position to help ensure their survival.”
The census.
And then there was the moment where she had smiled at me before and I had dropped the phone. This time I held her gaze.
“But aren’t you afraid?” the interviewer asked her. “Do you have children?”
“You wouldn’t ask a man that question,” she said calmly.
It was silent for a moment before the interviewer said, “Fair enough.”
But she answered anyway. “I have a daughter,” she said in a voice as warm as light in a greenhouse. “I am always thinking of my daughter and the line of generations that will follow her. Humans have a great impact on the ocean. There is still time to reverse what we’ve done.”
I have a daughter. I am always thinking of my daughter. Lately, I had been wondering if she had been thinking about me when she got in the water with sharks. Had it been worth putting her life in danger to understand shark behavior or to try to prove to people that sharks aren’t man-eaters? I still thought she might have been a little crazy.
The next thing I knew, the camera people were filming her in scuba gear, flipping backward off the side of the boat. It took two tries for me to swallow. It was her own body, and not the sharks, which would eventually kill her. But when the camera below the surface captured footage of her plunging into the water, I stopped thinking about dark things. She looked like a dolphin, being born into the water, swimming away just seconds after birth. Swimming underwater, my mom was graceful and at ease.
I paused the tape.
“Dad! Sookie!” I cried.
At an unimpressive speed, Sookie appeared in the doorway, followed by my dad.
“What?” said Sookie.
“You’ve gotta see this,” I said, rewinding the tape back to the beginning of the section. His expression changed.
“That’s what we saw on TV!” Sookie said.
Dad just watched.
She swam alongside the rope that was anchored to the bottom and into a shipwreck, covered in earthy greens. There were little fish of various sizes swimming around everywhere and then the sharks came into focus. They swam by my mom like a fleet of small ships moving through the wreck, their sandy-brown skin gliding past her, caudal fins rippling like fabric through the water.
I was surprised by the way the sharks swam at a slow pace and how they seemed to pay no attention to her at all. They must have known she was there, but maybe she knew just how to blend in. She didn’t reach out to touch them. She swam parallel to the sharks, just another creature in the ocean.
“I remember this,” Dad said. “Where did you find the tape?”
He was clearly distracted because there was a pile of VHS tapes on the floor next to the box.
“In the bookshelf,” I said.
I stopped paying attention to the TV and observed Sookie and Dad as they watched Mom, her black form keeping pace with the brown sharks, sailing through an exit in the shipwreck, as fluid as the fish. Dad leaned a little deeper into his crutch. Sookie put his hands on his hips. It was like she had knocked them both a little off balance.
When the narrator abruptly cut to footage of whale sharks in Saudi Arabia, far away from Mom’s ocean, Dad said, “Play it again.”
It was a little strange to me that Sookie and Dad had both loved my mom (and they were okay with it), but watching her navigate a strange world so capably made us all want to truly understand how she worked. She was kind of amazing.
The third time through the clip, there was a knock on the doorframe. It was Fiona.
“No one answered. I let myself in,” she said.
I waved her over.
Fiona stood in front of the TV, eyeing the sharks that sailed past the diver.
“What are we watching?” she asked.
“Mom,” I said.
Fiona looked at me. Then she stared at the screen.
A sand shark passed over Mom’s head, swimming through the bubbles rising from her regulator. The camera tracked Mom as she followed the shark, as though she were flying by us. Her flippers rippled and she was gone.
“Real women look like that,” I said.
Fiona put her arm around me.
We watched the clip one more time before Sookie and Dad headed back downstairs to see the baseball game, but on his way out the door, Sookie turned to me and said, “I called Robin after the necropsy.”
“Really?” I said.
He nodded. “I told her I’d help them tag the sharks.”
I smiled.
“I told Robin I’d try to get you to come with me,” he said.
I looked at Fiona. “I’ll go.”
* * *
° ° ° °
That night, I dreamed about the quarry. I was below the surface. The water was dull green, like the trees in a Hudson River School painting, but it looked glassy and clear. While I was treading water and breathing like a mermaid, a white shark swam closer, the side-to-side movement of his tail propelling the shark forward. Like I had X-ray goggles, I could see each vertebra shift as he glided around me. I turned to watch the shark, as nervous as a kid might feel waiting for her name to be called for a doctor’s checkup, but nothing more. I labeled his fins in my mind, the quarry water flowing through his gills. He drew another loop around me before swimming away, and as he sailed by, he made a ping.
36. Ping
Dad once told me to look at the horizon to keep from getting seasick, but it was impossible to get a fix on it while holed up in the cabin of a harpoon boat that had windows the size of Kleenex boxes.
Mr. Patterson slowly came down the steps into the dark cabin for the second time. He was wearing a white sun hat and huge, dark glasses that reminded me of Fred.
“Any sharks?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “But you’re not going to see any down here. You should come up.”
“I will,” I said.
He wasn’t moving.
“This was your idea,” he said, looking me in the eye.
“I know.”
I wanted to get out there, but I still felt shaky on the water.
I followed him up the stairs, the waves rocking the boat up and down. I took careful steps toward the bow of the boat, to see what Sookie was up to. My heart nearly stopped when I saw him at the far edge of the narrow catwalk, nearly a boat’s length away, dangling over the ocean like bait at the end of a fishing pole. Sookie stood in a waist-high, metal pulpit, with his back to us, holding on to a long metal stick. A harpoon with an acoustic tag.
He seemed so far away from us, from the boat, in a tiny cage. I wondered what it felt like to be hovering like that with only a thin railing between him and the water, when I could barely keep my balance on the boat. Sookie looked more steady than the rest of us.
“I’m going to go sit with your father,” Mr. Patterson said, working his way across the deck.
I sucked in a big breath, connecting the parts of the scene. There was a spotter plane, looking for sharks from above. Sookie hung over the ocean, yards beyond the boat with the harpoon in hand, waiting for the white shark to swim underneath him, so he could tag the fish. It was as if the drawings in Mom’s proposal had come to life.
It felt cool on the boat, even though it had been another warm August day, so I wore a thick sweatshirt. A pair of binoculars hung from my neck, swinging back and forth as I tacked around the deck, moving from one stationary object I could grab to the next, like I was learning to walk again.
My head felt dizzy, maybe because of the rocking motion of the boat or the hum of the engine. I held on to the metal rail along the side of the boat, looking out into the water. There were small waves inside the big waves, and the surface reminded me of an elephant’s wrinkled skin with lines in all directions. I watched the peaks and valleys of the big waves, waiting for something large to be revealed in the ups and downs, like a whale or a shark.
The pilot’s voice came over the boat’s radio in a fog of static. It reminded me of Mr. Patterson’s police scanner.
“Bfff . . . He’s turning right now. He’s turning right,” the pilot said.
I gripped the railing and looked at Robin on deck. “What’s turning right?” I yelled to her.
“A shark,” she said. “A white.”
Robin was standing at the beginning of the catwalk, smiling, shouting at Sookie. The team had been out on the boat several times in the past week, but managed to successfully tag only one white shark. If they wanted to collect enough data for their study, they would need several more. The shark turning right was Number Two.
“Right there,” Sookie yelled.
It was as if the shark had sensed it was being watched, stalked even, because right when Sookie aimed the harpoon at the fish, the shark shifted in a different direction.
“Bfff . . . He’s turning,” said the pilot between farty blips.
“Get him! Get him!” Robin yelled.
But it was too late. Sookie had released the harpoon into the water like an arrow that sailed far beyond the outermost circle of a target. Missed. Even the clams that were tucked away in the muck could hear him curse.
Robin walked slowly out to the pulpit with a second harpoon, stopping after the first couple of steps to get her balance and maybe find the nerve to keep going. Over my shoulder, I spotted a third harpoon leaning several yards away from the catwalk, loaded with another acoustic tag. I thought about picking it up and waiting near the edge of the catwalk, in case Sookie needed it.
The radio crackled. “He’s going for the starboard side.”
That’s my side.
My heart started beating faster. Without thinking I grabbed the harpoon in the middle like I was a javelin thrower. But I didn’t walk it to Sookie. I turned to face the waves off the starboard side of the boat. I climbed up on the ledge and leaned my stomach against the metal rail, watching the water in the space between Sookie’s catwalk and me. I was like Fred shucking off his sweatshirt at the quarry, running to the edge of the cliff.
“Bfff . . . Uh-oh. The kid is taking aim. Somebody move,” the spotter pilot said in a monotone voice over the radio, as though it were no big deal that I was about to launch an acoustic tracking device onto the seafloor.
“I got this one!” I yelled out.
I heard people’s sneakers slapping the deck in an anxious attempt to stop me, but I knew I could do it. I knew this shark as well as any of the adults on the boat. I had drawn its body inside and out—the vertebrae like cartilaginous Legos, the placement of the organs, the fins, and the industrial hinges of the jaw. I knew this shark. I scrubbed one hundred attempts clean with my eraser, trying to get the right distance between the fins or the right amount of muscular girth. And each time I messed up, I was one step closer to understanding how fast this creature moved, how those jaws could pop out like a lizard throwing its tongue to catch a fly.
So, with people yelling my name, I saw the shark’s shadow coming into view just below the surface. And I threw the heavy javelin like a warrior, ahead of where I wanted it to land: in that fleshy part, right below the dorsal fin.
“Bfff . . . She got it!” the spotter pilot yelled, his voice cracking. “Shark’s about fourteen feet long.”
I watched the shark wiggle, like he was trying to scratch an itch on his back, and I ran along the railing to get ahead of him, so I could see him swim by. I held on to the railing and leaned over to look, my hair whipping my cheeks. The long body glided by with the power of one hundred Olympic swimmers, seemingly with zero effort. His skin looked brown just under the surface, unlike the slate-gray color of Sookie’s shark that hung on the dock, or the one that washed up on the Cape. I wanted to reach out and touch its back, which was covered in denticles, V-shaped scales that were like teeth all over the shark’s body. The denticles decreased drag and made the shark able to swim quickly and quietly. I wondered what they felt like gliding through the water.
“Holy fish,” I whispered, as I watched the fin and tail sink below the surface and slip away. The shark descended until it was out of sight. There was a breeze in my face. I imagined it was the tailwinds of the shark and I breathed in.
When I turned around, Robin, Dad, Mr. Patterson, and Sookie were all looking at me. I couldn’t believe what I’d done either.
Dad grabbed my elbow and leaned over to look me in the eye. “Lucy Elizabeth Everhart. That was important equipment that many scientists—including your mother—worked hard to get. It’s not yours to pitch off the boat!”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you weren’t,” he said.
I looked at Robin. She seemed both angry and stunned. And maybe worried, like she might have invited some kind of a delinquent onto the boat.
“Lucy,” she said, breathing heavy and talking slowly. “I do appreciate that you tagged that shark. In fact, it’s kind of a miracle. But I would prefer if you left the job to Sookie from here on. Okay?”
I nodded. “Sure thing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m gonna check on Ray and see if he’s got anything on the receiver,” she said. Robin hesitated for a second, then she turned to me. “My mother used to tell me that the best defense for anything is doing a good job.”
She lowered her chin and looked me straight in the eye.
I stared back. Robin walked over to the equipment.
Sookie shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“I can’t believe I whiffed and you nailed it,” he said. “You gotta admit, Tom. It was pretty impressive.”
Dad sat down on the ledge, leaned his crutch against the rail, and sighed.
Mr. Patterson lowered himself beside Dad. “Sookie’s right.”
Robin was talking to the spotter pilot over the radio, and Ray was listening on the headphones to see if he could pick up the shark’s ping. I walked over to Ray and pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt.
“Can you hear it?” I asked.
; Ray nodded, but he looked unsure and adjusted a knob on the receiver. With his other hand, he turned a handle that was attached to a pipe, running down the side of the boat, into the water. At the bottom of the pipe was the hydrophone, a piece of equipment that could pick up the shark’s ping from the tag. The ping was strongest when the hydrophone was pointing directly at the tag.
“Do you have him?” Robin yelled to Ray.
Ray nodded. “Yup.”
Ray pulled the headphones off his ears and let them dangle around his neck. “We’re gonna let you name this one,” he said. “Since you tagged it.”
“Thanks. Its name is Fred. What does it sound like?” I asked Ray.
“The ping?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to listen?” he asked.
I nodded. He put the enormous headphones over my ears. I adjusted the headband. At first, we heard fuzz, static like on Mr. Patterson’s police scanner. I shook my head at Ray. But then there was a sound. It was like my elementary music teacher, banging on a handheld wood block with a little mallet. Bom, bom, bom. Then static for a few beats, like a rest in a piece of music. Bom, bom, bom.
Fred the Shark was making a pattern, slightly irregular, like a kid learning to play an instrument. Bom, bom, bom. I closed my eyes and listened to a long stretch of fuzz. Bom, bom, bom.
It could have been straight out of Fred’s Miles Davis album, where the musicians made sounds that had never been made by instruments before. But for some reason, when Fred the Shark played the notes, I wanted to keep listening. It reminded me of what Mr. Patterson had said on our way back from Maine. Maybe you have to see it performed live to appreciate it. Keep your mind open to it.
In the static rests, I started echoing the pings in my head. After Fred the Shark said, Bom, bom, bom, I said, Bom, bom, bom, and he would respond again. It went on that way for a minute or two. Then I started filling the rests with thoughts, things I would have written to Fred in a postcard.
“I just saw a great white swim by.”
Bom, bom, bom.
